Masturbating To Solzhenitsyn: Nadya Tolokonnikova as a Hero of Our Time

text by Max Lawton

At dinner with Pussy Riot founder Nadya Tolokonnikova after a reading at UCLA, the famous Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin gets ready to make a toast––he loves making toasts. His toasts are often wry, slightly sarcastic, and metaphysical. They’re like little slogans drawn from his novels. But, getting ready to pronounce this one, he looks deadly serious. 
He meets Nadya’s eyes and raises his broad-bulbed glass of Malbec: 
“To a hero of our time!”
He takes a beat as glasses clink.
“I mean it Nadya… you’re a true hero of our time.”
Nadya looks touched. She thanks Vladimir in heartfelt fashion.
But Vladimir is also being a little bit funny. He does believe that Nadya is a hero of our time, he wouldn’t say it otherwise, but those precise words are, of course, a reference to the title of the classic Lermontov novel––a Romantic text about a doomed Russian soldier in Central Asia.
The meat of his words are what he means, but their surface always has a conceptual cast to them.
The dinner continues.
The reason Vladimir feels such a strong kinship with Nadya isn’t entirely explicable by way of typical notions of the Dissident in Russia. Vladimir is quite skeptical of the stereotypical cult figure of the dissident writer. Even so, throughout his 40-year career, Vladimir has constantly been in the crosshairs of the powers that be for his wildly controversial reimaginings and desacralizations of Russian life. In his first novel The Norm, he depicts the Soviet Union as an enormous social experiment in which the single most substantial rule is that all citizens must eat literal shit (referred to as “norm”) every day––or be arrested. In Their Four Hearts, he recasts the end of the Soviet Union as a Bataillean rampage filled with pedophilia and coprophagia. 
And in My First Working Saturday, he brings his experience in the Moscow Conceptual Underground to bear in the creation of strange prose texts that draw more from Andy Warhol than they do from Fyodor Dostoievsky. Starting out not as a writer, but a painter, Vladimir was inspired by the way that painters in the Moscow Conceptual Underground like Eric Bulatov and Ilya Kabakov simply appropriated Soviet visual tropes and used them in their paintings in a way that, though they were hardly altered, entirely deflated them. The short-story collection My First Working Saturday is made up entirely of binary bombs: their first halves are pitch-perfect imitations of Soviet Socialist Realist prose, but, in the middle of each story, there’s an explosion and some aberrant act of violence or linguistic insanity pushes the story into a new world that couldn’t be further from official Soviet aesthetics. 
However, it’s the novel Marina’s 30th Love that seems most relevant to Vladimir’s adulation of Nadya. In that book, the titular lesbian dissident often masturbates to the icon-like picture of Solzhenitsyn by her bed:

Through the spreading cigarette smoke, Marina met those eyes for the umpteenth time, then sighed.
HE always looked as if he were waiting for the answer to a question posed by his piercing eyes: what have you done to merit being called HUMAN? ‘I try to merit it,’ she replied with her eyes, large and slanting like a doe’s. And, as always, after the first mute conversation, HIS face began to grow more kind, his pursed lips lost their sternness, the wrinkles around his eyes gathered together softly and calmly, and loose strands of hair fell onto his forehead with a human helplessness all too well-known to her. His triangular face lit up with a familiar, tender kindness. 
[...] Marina was certain that everything with HIM would come to pass properly. As it was meant to happen––that which, alas, she’d never had with a single man. That stupid, medical-sounding term ORGASM was shoved out of her fantasies with disgust, synonyms were searched for, but they weren’t able to describe what the heart felt so sharply and clearly…
[...] HE always remained a form of secret knowledge, a hidden possibility of true love, that which Marina dreamed about, that which her slender, swarthy body craved, falling asleep in the arms of yet another girlfriend…

Even though she can’t have orgasms with men, Marina imagines that Solzhenitsyn––HE––will manage to give her one. For Vladimir, this part of the novel acts as a way to distance himself from basic, unreflective dissidence. His dissidence is better represented by Marina’s masturbation or by Stalin and Khrushchev’s apolitical anal sex in Blue Lard than it is by unimaginative pamphleteering.
When Vladimir cheekily referenced Lermontov in calling Nadya a “hero of our time” at dinner, I’m certain that his words were a way of making it clear that she also belongs to this nuanced mode of dissidence. 
Indeed, Nadya has proven herself capable of mastering wildly diverse idioms of art and discourse, then handily transforming them into conceptual outgrowths of her central project, which is simultaneously political, sexual, and aesthetic. To claim that Nadya’s whole project is simply undermining the Russian government would be just as ridiculous as those who would have Sorokin be a straightforward anti-Russian dissident in a Solzhenitsian mode. It’s for this reason that Nadya has said that “for better or worse, there would be no Pussy Riot without The Norm and Blue Lard.” 
Like Vladimir, Nadya coöpts genres and styles, eviscerates them, then makes them her bitch. 
An able and worthy mistress, Nadya turns punk rock, NFTs, conceptual installations, and performance art into latex-masked subs, all performing her will in a state of total submission.
Just like in Putin’s Ashes, a squadron of balaclava-clad women doing a ritual to bring about Putin’s death, they bear a flag with the Russian word for CUNT and a button that “neutralizes Vladimir Putin,” they stand in formation before a burning effigy of Putin’s face, Nadya, wearing a white balaclava, is the leader, drone shots above them in the beautiful desert night, the entire squadron stabs the ground, the women spit into the sand in Putin’s general direction, then Nadya collects the ashes from the effigy. 
Just as is the case with everything else that passes through her art, the Putin’s Ashes project has turned Vladimir Putin into Nadya’s bitch. 
Yes, in a very real way, over the course of the video, these ashes become Putin’s real ashes and no effigy. 
In that same vein, these days, Nadya often recites Orthodox prayers for Putin’s swift and painful death.
This performance might seem confusing from the perspective some people once had (or still have) of Nadya: a rock musician who writes anti-Putin music and was arrested for performances in public places. How narrow-minded and inaccurate! Punk was merely the medium for her message at that time. Now, it’s Death Grips and gabber-influenced electronic music––sometimes ornamented by her truly awesome death-metal screams––that has become a better accompaniment to her aesthetic project. 
But her project goes far beyond music. Given her recent collaboration with Judy Chicago, and the Putin’s Ashes exhibition, it should by now be utterly clear that Nadya is an artist who takes control of conceptual modes in the same way that Sorokin and his conceptual forebears in the Moscow underground once did. 
Any artistic idiom should be so lucky as to have Nadya dominate it––to have Nadya as a mistress.
Like Marina masturbating to Solzhenitsyn, Nadya represents a challenge to fossilized forms of dissident activity. 
It goes without saying that, in delivering his toast, Vladimir also meant that Nadya is a “hero of our time” in terms of sheer physical bravery. That’s probably what gives her a certain affinity with Lermontov’s hero. She’s a badass who puts herself in dangerous situations that most people wouldn’t dream of. But what she does on top of that, as in Putin’s Ashes is hyper-nuanced. 
It’s conceptual art and she’s a conceptual artist––even in the context of NFTs, and OnlyFans, and over-the-top music. 
I can’t wait to see what idiom this “hero of our time” appropriates next––to see which artform gets to wear the latex mask. Whatever it ends up being, I’m sure it shall be completely and utterly dominated by Nadya’s fierce artistic, political, and sexual energy.

Нож для Путина точу,
Зла тебе я не прощу.

Sharpening a knife for Putin,
I will not forgive your evil.

Max Lawton is a writer and musician, and translator of many books by Vladimir Sorokin and Jonathan Littell.

Putin’s Ashes will be on view at Jeffrey Deitch from January 27 through February 3, 2023. 7000 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90038. On opening night (6-8PM), there will be a performance, click here to RSVP. Only people in balaclavas will be granted entry. Balaclavas will be provided at the gallery entrance. Guests are encouraged to bring their own balaclavas.

Shepard Fairey, Pussy Riot, Nadya Tolokonnikova

flyer by Shepard Fairey

AMEN Picasso: A Night @ The Picasso Museum in Paris

AMEN Candles celebrates the launch of AMEN Picasso with Diana Picasso, Haider Ackerman, Ellen Von Unwerth, Delphine Arnault, Giambatista Valli, Marco Ribeiro, Willy Cartier, Sinichiro Ogata, Prince Wenzeslaus of Liechtenstein, Pauline Ducruet, Quentin de Briey among many others.

Maison AMEN is a Paris-based candle brand that was established by Uruguayan-born designer Rodrigo Garcia in 2020. Pioneers within the market, they create high-end candle and light sculpture designs that are handmade in Grasse, the world capital of perfumery, just minutes away from Pablo’s Antibes Studio. On a mission to create a world free of plastic, AMEN’s products are entirely sustainable, made from vegetal wax that is free of toxic paraffin. They are poured into a reusable porcelain jar and packaged in plastic-free, mushroom containers that are carbon negative. The launch of their new collection of candles took place at the Musée national Picasso-Paris in collaboration with Diana W. Picasso, curator of the exhibition Maya Ruiz-Picasso: Daughter of Pablo.

With the aim of bringing together a significant ensemble of fourteen portraits, the exhibition asks us to reexamine a part of Picasso’s oeuvre through the prism of their filial relationship to highlight the bond that unites father and daughter and to emphasize how Maya’s presence nourished and amplified the artist’s fascination for childhood. Through the presentation of major works from the 1930s — portraits of Maya and Marie-Thérèse — sculptures, paper cut-outs, and memorabilia such as letters, poems, and personal objects, the project seeks to illustrate this chapter of Picasso’s intimate history. Completed by an important selection of photographs, some of which hitherto unseen, the exhibition will, more generally, question the relationship between Picasso and his children, notably during his years in Cannes during which the artist shared happy moments with his four children gathered together. It is the first of many Picasso exhibitions that will take place at museums around the globe throughout the year of 2023 in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death.

The scented candles were selected by Rodrigo Garcia and Diana Picasso. As curator of innumerable Picasso exhibitions, she combines paintings with feelings and memories from her life as the artist’s granddaughter. “I felt strongly that the scent for Figure (1927) was Naranja y Canela, a Mediterranean summer in the south of France. Acrobate (1932) became the strength of the Ginger and Nu couche (1932), which translates to ‘Lying down naked’ is the sensuality of Amber. For Guitar a la main blanche (1932) with the letters MT, I remembered a love letter of my grandfather Pablo to my grandmother ‘You are always on me, Marie-Thérèse, mother of sparkling perfumes pungent with star jasmines.’ To me, it's been the most exhilarating experience to add sense to all these profoundly emotional works. I immediately responded to the beliefs behind AMEN: to add soul to the scents and to cherish our Mother Earth.”

scribbles of writing on a piece of paper.

The collection is available to purchase at the Musée National Picasso, Paris Dover Street Parfums Matket, the Met Museum New York, Gagosian’s galleries in New York & London, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Selfridges, Antonioli Milan, Moda Operandi, and globally through amencandles.fr. Maya Ruiz-Picasso: Daughter of Pablo is on view through December 31 at the Musée national Picasso-Paris 5 rue de Thorigny, 75003.

Read Our Interview of Teresa Baker on the Occasion of Her Solo Exhibition @ NADA Miami →

A woman ( Teresa Baker) in a studio with art in the back and a table at her side.

Raised nomadically along the Northern Plains of the United States, artist Teresa Baker spent her childhood shrouded in tribal storytelling. However, it wasn’t until recently that she realized how thoroughly steeped her visual work had become in all of these inherited allegories. Working with a wide range of materials, both organic and inorganic, she weaves the fiction and nonfiction of her heritage to create works that reflect the complex nature of American tradition. Referencing artists of the abstract expressionist, cubist, and postminimalist movements in harmony with the topographical territories and utilitarian objects employed by the Indigenous nations who inform her practice, Baker imbues her works with an autonomy that allows them to be singular and timeless. In anticipation of her solo exhibition with de boer, Los Angeles at NADA Miami, I spoke with the artist about her unusual path into artmaking, the influence of her wide-reaching travels abroad, and the delicate balance of becoming a mother while the demand for her work has skyrocketed. Read more.

Robert Colescott's "Women" Opens @ Venus Over Manhattan

Robert Colescott: Women traces the development of the artist’s depictions of female subjects over the course of his sixty-year career. Serving as a coda to the recent, critically-lauded traveling museum retrospective Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott, this presentation charts the evolution of Colescott’s ambitious practice through some thirty works produced between 1955 and 1996. Organized in close collaboration with The Robert H. Colescott Separate Property Trust, Venus Over Manhattan’s exhibition is the first to trace the development of Colescott’s representations of women through major works from key moments in his career.

Robert Colescott: Women will be on view at Venus Over Manhattan’s downtown location at 55 Great Jones Street from November 15, 2022 through January 14, 2023.

 
 

Read Our Interview Of Ceri Hand: The Art Mentor Fostering A More Inclusive Art World →

Ceri Hand, Photo by Lorna Milburn

From running a successful commercial art gallery to becoming Associate Director at Simon Lee Gallery and director of programs at Somerset House Trust, London, Ceri Hand, also known as the Artist Mentor, is championing a more holistic support framework for creative practitioners and professionals through her mentoring and coaching services. 

Lara Monro spoke with Hand about how her own experiences in the arts shaped her approach to mentoring and coaching, and why her upbringing instilled a level of responsibility in championing a more inclusive art world.  

Growing up in the Midlands, Hand was introduced to the importance of social justice and the need to support others from a young age. Her mother established and ran women's refuges and her father taught children with learning disabilities. While Hand came from a multi-racial family who combatted racism by achieving great success in business and embracing family, music and dance, she was confronted by the realities of prejudice from a young age. Read more.

"Terms of Belonging" Group Exhibition On View Now At Gavlak Gallery

Gavlak presents Terms of Belonging, an intergenerational exhibition of Latin American artists featuring Allora & Calzadilla, Candida Alvarez, Jose Alvarez (D.O.P.A.), Iván Argote, Ricardo Brey, Gisela Colón, Débora Delmar, Teresita Fernández, Ignacio Gatica, Lucia Hierro, Alfredo Jaar, Anuar Maauad, Carlos Martiel, Joiri Minaya, Gabriela Salazar, Yoab Vera, and Valeria Tizol Vivas. The word “belonging” conveys an effortless kinship: a natural affinity between like and like. The imposition of the word “terms,” however, shatters this ideal and serves to remind that communities are also forged through selective exclusions. By focusing solely on conceptual practices in the work of Latin American artists, Terms of Belonging asks what it means for an artist to refuse the call for “positive” representation on behalf of a marginalized community through established artistic conventions and forms. Though this pressure to produce and/ or represent on behalf of a larger cultural identity is not isolated to artists of the Latin American diaspora, Terms of Belonging proposes a framework for Latin American art that does not hinge on nationality or ethnicity. Like the contentious term “Latinx,” the exhibition signals the need to expand beyond antiquated categories of belonging while acknowledging the ways in which these new and supposedly more inclusive terms are themselves rooted in specific and localized definitions of Latin American experience. Like the broader conceptual and minimalist traditions to which they belong, the works in the exhibition do not comprise a rejection of figuration, or identitarian concerns entirely. Instead the inclusion or allusion to real bodies constitutes an acknowledgment of the reductive nature of individual and collective identity, and a desire to speak beyond the constraints of the self. The exhibition will continue through December 10, 2022. A closing panel moderated by curator Susanna V. Temkin, PhD. will take place on Saturday, December 10, 2022 and Valeria Tizol Vivas will perform her durational piece remejunje: requemar.

Warning Shots Not Required: Henry Taylor Proves His Undeniable Genius at MoCA Los Angeles

text and photographs by Oliver Kupper

This is his house. This is his city. This is Henry’s world. In the earth-shattering career survey of Henry Taylor’s oeuvre at MOCA Grand Ave. in Los Angeles, the artist proves beyond a reasonable doubt that he is one of the most important painters of our generation. Organized thematically, not chronologically, B Side is a tragicomic traversal, a dissection of the artist’s prolific body of work, but also a glorious star-spangled journey into the heart of a racialized America. Like a Max Roach drum solo or a Duke Ellington intro, the survey is an abstract confession of genius in a collective of large, energized paint strokes. There are friends, lovers, family, and humanized portrayals of people living, or more so surviving, on Skid Row. There is Miles Davis and his wife Cicely Tyson outside Obama’s White House—a distinct psychological examination of a "post-racial" America. Black Americana as a speculative exercise in fictional temporalities—the notion of hanging on to a dream like a vertical rock cliff. There is Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, in full military regalia with the words ‘Tupac’ and ‘Coffee’—two cultural exports with distinctly colonial and revolutionary implications. There is track and fielder Carl Lewis long jumping past a white picket fence with a prison looming behind him and the word ‘gold’ written in large stenciled lettering. Indeed, a carceral foreboding looms over these paintings as a distinct soliloquy of Black life in America, and the thin blue line pierces through with horrifying consequences. In THE TIMES THAY AINT CHANGING, FAST ENOUGH! (2017), the killing of Philando Castile is captured in stark blocks of color: a body slumped over, arms clutching an invisible bullet wound, a twisted car seat, a white hand holding a 9mm glock. B Side also delivers a vast breadth of rarely seen works, like his sketches made during his ten-year stint working at the Camarillo State Mental Hospital where the likes of Charlie Parker and jazz pianist Phineas Newborn Jr. went to fight their addictions to heroin. There are also painted objects, like cigarettes, cereal boxes, and even a black typewriter case with the words: “I try to be write aint TRY’n to be WHITE.” In the end, you can never demand more, because Henry Taylor gives every part of himself. You are too stunned to flip the record over, so you let the stylus fall into the last groove where it crackles gently, romantically, to the edge of your reverie.

Henry Taylor: B Side is on view through April 30 at MOCA Grand Avenue

 
 

Jermaine Francis Presents A Storied Ground @ Galerie PCP in Paris

A blurry image of 2 men in a dry field, while one holds a dog. Both of them have their back to the camera.

PROJECTION: ‘A PROSPECT BEFORE KENWOOD HOUSE’ ENGLAND, 2022

The visuality of British Landscape painting in the tradition of such luminaries as Sir Thomas Gainsborough, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Sir John Constable have long provided viewers with a pastoral history of the British Landscape as an idealized and romantic one, free of the politics of the time and offering an aesthetic paradigm for the fabled “English countryside” that we know today. But the visual culture that produced those sweeping pastoral views, sometimes populated by wealthy white landowners, dressed in the finest garments of the time and enjoying leisure activities that were decidedly of the titled class. In fact, those sweeping views also contained nuanced messages pertaining to white ownership of that landscape, the right to surveil their own private property, and the centrality of the white body as both owner, and natural, and “neutral” inhabitant of that landscape.  

Using those same gestures as the centrality of the body occupying space, Jermaine Francis’ project obliges the viewer to reconsider who is considered a natural inhabitant of the British landscape. The history and the visualization of the landscape is about property and wealth, but embedded are deeper meanings alluding to a sense of belonging and ownership. This project situates the Black body within those landscapes with both an unflinching primacy as well as a natural ease. The participants of Francis’ photographs do not offer a reason to justify their position in the landscape: they have a right to occupy that space without explanation. This tension, as well as the lack of textual narrative accompanying the exhibition, challenges and invites the viewer to regard the Black body within the landscape as neutral and with agency; as being in harmony with and not as an anomaly to that landscape.  

A Storied Ground is on view through December 17 @ Galerie PCP 8 Rue Saint-Claude 75003

Vikky Alexander "Les Jardins de Versailles" @ Wilding Cran Gallery

Bring on the warm jets. In legendary pioneer of the Appropriation and Pictures Generation movements, artist Vikky Alexander mines the artifice and simulacra of paradise in a new body of work that takes us down the primrose path of the Gardens of Versailles. Since the 1980s, Alexander has explored desire and fantasy in media landscapes. In this series of collages and wall works, the landscapes are more literal, collaged and beautifully mounted on aluminum with a clash of crisp and pixelated color palettes. The blue of bygone travel agencies. The brown of a divorce lawyer’s filing cabinet. There are pieces of familiarity—old magazine cut outs, advertisements, but also photographs from the artist’s archive. Utopia deconstructed. Beauty as a slash and burn exercise in dismantling the illusions of our industrial society’s control over nature. Alexander will always be a master at this unique craft. In this case, the beautiful Gardens of Versailles denote something more sinister. The garden as a manifestation of a Jungian god complex. Vikky Alexander "Les Jardins de Versailles" will be on view until December 22 at Wilding Cran Gallery.

Read Our Interview of Daniel Richter On the Occasion of His Solo Exhibition Opening @ Regen Projects In Los Angeles →

a painting with various figures across, bigger and smaller in inverted colors. In the background is a gas station/buildings.

Daniel Richter
Fun de Siecle
2002
Oil on Canvas
115.75 x 151.18 inches (294 x 384 cm)


interview by Oliver Kupper

Artist Daniel Richter cut his teeth designing music posters and album covers in the antifascist, squatter punk scene of Hamburg in the 1980s and ‘90s. Now based in Berlin, the spirit of rebellion is wielded by the knife blade of his paintbrush in works that cross violently across the threshold between abstraction and figuration. With inspiration from early French symbolists, his work holds a mirror to a society pervaded by chaos and perversity. His show, Limbo, which coincides with the 59th Biennale di Venezia, was presented in a palazzo where a Catholic brotherhood once provided spiritual benediction to those sentenced to brutal public executions. Today marks the opening of his solo exhibition, Furor II, at Regen Projects in Los Angeles. We caught up with Richter while he was on vacation in Trieste, Italy where an oligarch’s seized Philippe Starck-designed superyacht was moored just outside his hotel window. Read more.

Bergen Assembly: Yasmine & the Seven Faces of the Heptahedron

Installation view from Shirin Sabahi’s exhibition, The Moped Rider, 2022 
Bryggens Museum. Courtesy the artist © VG Bild-Kunst, Bergen Assembly 2022 convened by  Saâdane Afif and curated by Yasmine d´O. Photo: Nicolas Rösener

text by Lara Schoorl


The days after the opening weekend of Bergen Assembly, my (personal) quest for the Heptahedron continues. Revisiting my notes, the exhibition texts and issues of Side Magazine, searching for names, plays, the histories of artists, artworks, and possibly imaginary people, I am not quite lost but certainly uprooted in the spiraling narrative that Saâdane Afif inspired across seven exhibition sites in Bergen, Norway. 

I confuse the artists with the characters and characters with exhibition sites, or perhaps that is the point; to let my imagination run its own course. Together, they form my image of the Professor, the Coalman, the Moped Rider, the Tourist, the Fortune Teller, the Bonimenteur, and an Acrobats. The cast of Afif’s Bergen Assembly. And together these characters are to merge into a heptahedron; a seven-sided shape—my heptahedron. A multifaceted concept that is used as the storytelling device in the perennial exhibition to connect the presented artworks (old, new, and commissioned) to our current world. Taken from the unpublished (imaginary) play, The Heptahedron, written by Thomas Clerc that is (supposedly) based on a performance of a geometry class by Afif for the 2014 Marrakech Biennale (see the possibility for the consciously imposed yet profound confusion). This form, evokes both mathematical and apocalyptic associations, literally shapes, and conceptually thematizes the third edition of Bergen Assembly. Each character is linked to one of seven sites and each site shows three participating artists. A conglomeration of layers that fold in on each other, challenging thought, yet facilitating navigation. 

 

Flag for Yasmine and the Seven Faces of the Heptahedron
© Bergen Assembly 2022, Convened by  Saâdane Afif and curated by Yasmine d´O. Photo: Nicolas Rösener 

 

Afif, as convener of the triennial, in turn invited Yasmine d’O as its curator. It is d’O who gives substance to this Heptahedron; the artists she curated into the shows flesh out the geometrical skeleton. As can be read in her curatorial statement, d’O had also been thinking about the idea of a solid body with seven faces for some time. Of course, she turns out to be (semi-)fictional too—on a webpage that sells clothing items on which Afif collaborated with Star Styling, I read that Yasmine d’O may refer to Yasmine d’Ouezzan, the first woman billiards champion of France in 1932. Although, not much information is found when further research concerning this fragment is conducted. Nevertheless, Yasmine, whoever she may be, is a crucial figure in the narrative of the exhibition. Having the Bergen Assembly titled after her, introducing her as the protagonist of the curatorial narrative under the same name as well, she becomes a symbol for the myriad paths through which one approaches the exhibition(s).  

As in all plays, there is a certain order of appearance of characters, although it is not mandatory to abide by in this case. And as often when consumed by a narrative, I cannot help but to have a favorite character. In Bergen, I visited each of them, spent time with their origin stories in the curatorial room at Bergen Kunsthall and with the works they are assigned to host in their locations. Although all characters resonated, each very aptly responds to current themes—questioning systems of knowledge production, acknowledging our human footprint, addressing climate crisis, highlighting identity politics, breaking gender boundaries—it was the Fortune Teller who kept calling me back. As fourth and middle character, tucked between The Moped Rider and The Coalman (arguably the strongest opposition between characters: freedom, movement and sidetracks versus death, old ways, and stagnation), spread across the spaces of Northing, an empty house, and a public open air listening booth, the Fortune Teller comprises the only non-institutional site. Jessika Khazrik, Miriam Stoney, and Alvaro Urbano are the artists that make up The Fortune Teller. 

 

Khazrik’s interdisciplinary installation, ATAMATA, is presented in Ekko, a club in Bergen, which includes a seven-channel video, silver-colored material covering sculptures as well as the club’s architecture, a series of interstellar raves, and a four-day music and performance program that “re-addresses club spaces as templar and serendipitous places of techno-political congregation and collective attunement with an ability to re-create and host different times and desires into the present.” The club becomes a social place not just for fun, but to celebrate, elevate, build, and change community; club as a place to call out and be heard. In an artist talk, Khazrik explained that the etymology of the Arabic word for ‘club’ returns the meaning to “calling,” while pointing out that silver as a color reflects rather than absorbs, multiplying what is present around. The affirmation we hear you, we see you is given additional dimensions in Khazrik work.

Across the street, in the abandoned rooms of Østre Skostredet 8, Urbano re-installed his work The Great Ruins of Saturn (2021). With the lights turned off, one steps into and becomes part of a performance in progress upon entering the old wooden home; shadows of small metal sculptures dance on the wall and inevitably on anyone stepping among them. While reminiscent of children’s projection puppet lamps, these sculptures also include stars and planets, the majority of the imagery are symbols of capitalism: dollar bills, UFOs, skyscrapers, futuristic cars, the Statue of Liberty, and the famous Unisphere. They directly refer to presentations, thoughts, and imaginations seen at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, of which some architectural ruins still remain unused in Queens’ Flushing Meadows Corona Park. Now disassembled, the remnants of the fair speak to one of the themes in Urbano’s practice: the longevity of the idea of future. What has become of these futuristic plans driven by corporate greed and capitalist gain? Originally made for Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, restaging the work in a ruin of Bergen, Urbano allows for the future to be reimagined again and acknowledges the cyclical understanding of time: that what was once future is now past. 

 

Installation view from Alvaro Urbano’s exhibition The Great Ruins of Saturn for The Fortune Teller, 2022 in Østre Skostredet, Bergen. Courtesy the artist. © Bergen Assembly 2022 convened by Saâdane Afif and curated by Yasmine d´O. Photo: Thor Brødreskift

 

It is not possible to hide from the future, perhaps similar to the way debt will catch up to you eventually. Stoney was commissioned to create a new work for the Bergen Assembly, for the Fortune Teller in particular, and so she wrote a book-length poem called Debt Verses in the voice of the Fortune Teller about debt and indebtedness. The poem is written in English and translated into Chinese and Norwegian, all languages appear alongside each other in a truly beautiful, harmonica foldout design with a magnetic cover so that it can be opened and read from two sides while remaining one book. This physical layering of the publication follows the structure of the narrative. Aside from commenting on credit lines, college loans, and debt collectors, seemingly fictional structures are voiced through bureaucratic auto messages, but in reality with the power to kill that haunt and settle into the fabric of everyday life, Stoney reels in another reality of academics and the acknowledgement of knowledge that is borrowed, which she extensively footnotes. Sometimes seen as a hiding behind others, the extensive referencing on one hand points to the exclusiveness of academia, and on the other, how an indebtedness to the backbone of the women informing it has long gone uncredited. Presented at Northing Space, temporarily turned into a bookstore, selling just one book, Debt Verses, deceives us a little just like its collectors and any form of socially constructed belief system. But not for long, as outside, this ironic ploy is countered by the installation of a public listening booth on Østre Skostredet, giving any passerby access to a full-length audio recording of the poem by Stoney.

Debt Verses, book signing by Miriam Stoney as part of Miriam Stoney’s exhibition Debt Verses | Vers om gjeld | 赋债, 2022 for The Fortune Teller, Northing Space Bergen. Courtesy the artist, Northing Bergen. © Bergen Assembly 2022 convened by Saâdane Afif and curated by Yasmine d’O. Photo: Yilei Wang

Whether conceptually or visually, each of the Three Fortune Tellers’ works is a call for visibility or immediate inclusivity. Silver-reflecting walls and daytime club hours in Khazrik’s work, shadow and light play in Urbano’s, as well as the act of re-predicting a formerly imagined future, and the literal highlighting of others’ texts informing one’s writing in Stoney’s poem are among some examples making this call tangible. It makes sense that in uncertain times of pandemic, war, raging gas prices and a declining economy, an insight into the future is most wanted now. This attitude, however, risks the future—the 1964 World’s Fair is an example par excellence—to turn into a commodity. Thus, when Afif introduced a Fortune Teller, she appears not to know what is to come, but as becomes so evident in Stoney’s words, to understand the guiding impact of the then and now on what will be. As the fourth character, The Fortune Teller is all of us, the rest spirals out of her. Beyond her call for a contemporary clairvoyance as opposed to a future one, all other characters, which I will leave for you to encounter, spread a message from their past or future positions: be here now.  A seven-sided form is tricky to imagine, let alone perceive completely at once, and so the heptahedron becomes a very accurate allegory for the impossibility to see the future if we cannot even see around the corner. To see all seven sides, one has to move, one character at a time, until a fragmented whole can be pieced together from the different viewpoints obtained. Then still, the figure that appears, is subjective; combine all subjective perceptions and the rest spirals out of her. “Depending on how you choose to look at it, the ebb and flow of life is a continuum that is either circular or moves back and forth, rather than being linear.”

Bergen Assembly runs through November 6, 2022 in Bergen Norway.

Installation view from Jessika Khazrik’s exhibition, The Fortune Teller, 2022 at Østre, Bergen Courtesy the artist. © Bergen Assembly 2022, convened by Saâdane Afif and curated by Yasmine d´O. Light design: Shaly Lopez. Photo: Thor Brødreskift

Emily Mae Smith "Heretic Lace" @ Petzel Gallery In New York

In Emily Mae Smith’s solo exhibition, Heretic Lace, on view at Petzel Gallery in New York, the pensive figures in the artist’s staggering and ominous paintings, who often take the form of humanoid brooms (descendants of the sweeper in Disney’s Fantasia, 1940), are trapped, blood on hands, in the rattling cage of art historical motifs. They look out over the horizon, expressionless, faceless, against a large moon or the amber hued glow of a window, with their bristled limbs in entropic environs. Flowers slightly wilted, a woodpecker gnashing at the timber, carnivorous felines, and hordes of mice invade the grain. As startlingly beautiful as they are, the paintings in Heretic Lace take on darker, psychosexual overtones (as compared to Smith’s past forays into the syntax of pop)—a distant famine, the memory of plagues and the torment of the artist in a zeitgeist at war with itself and haunted by the memories of the past. Formalities contradict themselves like brilliant paradoxes of form and perspective. There is a twisted surrealism that begs you to sweep all your nightmares under the rug.

Emily Mae Smith “Heretic Lace” is on view at Petzel Gallery until November 12th. All artwork courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York

Hot Concrete: Los Angeles Comes To Hong Kong For A Groundbreaking Exhibition

K11 MUSEA presents Hot Concrete: LA to HK, the first major group presentation of Los Angeles-based artists in Hong Kong, running from Friday, 21 October through to Sunday, 13 November 2022. Sponsored and supported by UBS AG, H.Moser & Cie and Ruinart; the exhibition is curated by Sow & Tailor (Los Angeles), presented by K11 MUSEA (Hong Kong) and WOAW Gallery (Hong Kong); and co-organized by Ouyang Art Consulting (Los Angeles). Hot Concrete: LA to HK is the second iteration of Sow & Tailor’s inaugural exhibition from 2021 with an expanded selection of thirty artists and over fifty-five artworks. As an epicenter for creativity not only in Asia, but also internationally, Hong Kong enthusiastically welcomes the explosive creativity of Los Angeles and the breadth and rigor of its multidisciplinary and multi generational artists. Hot Concrete: LA to HK’s unique curatorial perspective uses the four major principles of ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, as its point of departure, particularly a fresh approach, movement, balance, and harmony. The exhibition is not only a bridge that connects two significant artistic hubs and geographies, but also provides Hong Kong’s art-viewing public with a glimpse into the current creative energy of Los Angeles and its limitless opportunities for exploration, innovation, and self-fashioning. Hot Concrete not only fosters cultural exchange, but also injects the vibrancy of Los Angeles into Hong Kong’s cultural landscape, benefiting the latter’s community of artists, curators, collectors, and enthusiasts of art.

All images Courtesy of Sow & Tailor, Los Angeles and WOAW Gallery, Hong Kong. Photography and video by Hannah Kirby / Time Based Media 911, Los Angeles.

Watch Both Teasers Of "MIASMA", A Live Installation By Hannah Rose Stewart and Blackhaine @ Trauma Bar und Kino In Berlin

Drawing from Ligottian horror, MIASMA takes place in an unnamed seaside town in the artists’ home region of Northern England where a blackened volcanic hole opens below an abandoned car park. The work incorporates 3D design, neo-noir film, and the Japanese dance theatre of Butoh to unearth sensations of dread, mourning, and alienation.

MIASMA autopsies the corpse of post-industrial urbanity, carving out its wounds in unparalleled catharsis: an encounter with darkness that oscillates between the solemn and abrasive.

In Thomas Ligotti’s The Shadow at The Bottom of The World, a strange profusion surfaces and exhausts itself into the atmosphere, afflicting the air, vegetation, and people in a nearby town—ultimately turning a familiar place into an estranged version of itself. This duality becomes the subject of Hannah Rose Stewart and Blackhaine’s (Tom Heyes) debut audio-visual installation, MIASMA.

These uncanny dispositions frequently appear throughout MIASMA, within crowds of twisted and curled faces, as characters and dancers stagger past illegible signs of defunct businesses—a gesture to Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life: “You suppose that you could be in familiar territory … few landmarks. The tracks have numbers, not names. You can listen to them in any order. The point is to get lost.”

Live and recorded Butoh alchemize MIASMA’s provocations into a visceral, unnatural domain, forcing viewers to take part in the mutative rift that opens, not only across the towns, but also within the minds of its inhabitants and visitors.

Through the virtual and choreographic, MIASMA conducts its autopsy on the town’s post-industrial corpse, carving out its wounds in the act of unparalleled catharsis: an embrace and respondent transformation to darkness characterised by its balance of the intimate and abrasive.

Text by Matt Dell

MIASMA will be on view this Saturday, October 22 at 21:00 @ Trauma Bar und Kino Heidestraße 50, 10557 Berlin

Video by Hannah Rose Stewart
Graphic design by Jordi Theler
Ue5 development by Filip Setmanuk Soundtrack by Blackhaine, Croww, Rainy Miller

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A Look Back on Vienna’s “Curated by” Gallery Festival

Ola Vasiljeva
En Rachâchant, installation view Vleeshal Museum (2015)
courtesy the artist
photograph: Leo van Kampen

text by Lara Schoorl


Hope For The Rising Sun of Promise: East not West

Every September, for the past fourteen years, the start of Vienna’s gallery season coincides with Curated by; a monthlong festival that invites international curators to organize exhibitions in the Viennese contemporary art galleries, under an overarching theme. This was the first year that an “impulse provider” was invited to propose said theme to the curators. Elected by twenty-four participating galleries, Dieter Roelstraete, received the inaugural position to present a curatorial and artistic framework for the fourteenth edition of Curated by. 

In the shadow of the Russian invasion in Ukraine and the ongoing war, Roelstraete proposed “East” for the theme. More specifically “Kelet,” Hungarian for East, and explicitly the opposite of “Nyugat,” West. Nyugat was the name of a Budapest-originated, avant-garde journal from the early twentieth century; “Nyugat” one word that captured the desire for what was happening culturally in Paris and Munich, in the West. At that time, Budapest was still the second capital alongside Vienna of the Austrian-Hungarian empire, an interesting fact when thinking about cardinal directions now. Austria, and Vienna in particular, has long carried a gateway position (for culture) between East and West. During in the first half of the last century and through the Iron Curtain, and in the past two decades, Austrian art institutions have often gravitated towards the West in terms of who and what was shown. Yet now, as people move from Kyiv to Lviv, flee from East to West and South to North, Roelstraete urged, more than ever it is important to shift our perspective from West to the (expanded) East. And to then not see East as a place of trauma, but of promise, because “Is it not in the East,” he asks, “where the sun rises?” 

The theme, “Kelet,” remains open for interpretation to the gallerists and curators as East, of course, is a relative position or place depending on where one finds themselves. Although one imagines that this year the galleries might have invited curators and the curators in turn artists from the(ir) East. For Roelstraete “Kelet” provided a platform to contemplate a semantic shift for the meaning of East and or versus West through art in the European imagination. Curated by then may have formed a preliminary map of the state of art in the East (which can also be understood as Central or South and East of Vienna all the way to the Pacific). And such was the impression of the twenty-four exhibitions that spanned curators and artists of multiple generations from Ukraine, Slovenia and Georgia, to Kuala Lumpur and Mexico, and many countries in between.

The full-length curatorial essay by Roelstraete can be found here and below are highlights of this year’s Curated by, reflective of the various interpretations of “Kelet.”

SOPHIE TAPPEINER curated by Lukas Hofmann

Anna Zemánková
Untitled, the second half of 1960s
perforated paper, pastel, acrylic, china ink, embossing
60 x 41 (Detail)
Copyright and courtesy: The Artist’s Estate

Spread across two floors, SOPHIE TAPPEINER presented Pollen, a small retrospective of the self-taught Czechoslovakian artist Anna Zemánková (1908-1986). All works are on paper, all as seemingly fragile as their subjects, “my flowers,” as she called them, curator Lukas Hofmann explains. And all made in the twilight hours of dawn, before the rest of the world woke up—an unconscious nod to the East where the sun would rise as she worked. She used various techniques to create the flowers, often perforating the outlines and shapes in the paper and then coloring them with aquarelle paints, but some include stitching, ballpoint, and collage elements. They each required the viewer to take a step closer, especially her last works, which gradually became much smaller (a result of having both legs amputated and working exclusively from a board in her lap), to see the difference between thread and line and light, and then a step back in case the sun passes by or a light is lit behind them (as with the lamps), and their colors change, and shadows dance. Although the organic appearance of flowers, plants, butterflies and birds in the work is recognizable, the still not exactly true to nature imagery oozes a strong sense of elsewhere. Humble in their size and material, they breathe a kind of freedom. 

CRONE WIEN curated by Eva Kraus & Volo Bevza

In 2022, the works were equally as sharp as the exhibition title. Showing exclusively young artists from Ukraine, curators Eva Kraus and Volo Bevza localized East in one place to inquire about the repercussions of the war (and prior events) that take effect both locally and globally, and how those are experienced. Any type of event, including a war, but also protests and uprisings, can now be witnessed collectively through various instant (social) media outlets. Bevza wrote: “On the ground, you can feel the war, but most importantly, it is ‘experienced’ digitally.” The war takes places in Ukraine, in the East, in our phones all over the world. Reality is stretched into the digital realm, or the digital realm absorbs our reality. Either way, a blurry in between space is created and it is in this liminal space that the artists in 2022 make work. Analog and digital realities bleed into each other in the photography-based works of Victoria Pidust and the paintings of Artem Volokitin of Bevza. A floor to ceiling curtain, also by Bevza, printed with an image of a ruined structure characteristic of his paintings divided the front space of the gallery from the back space. A curatorial intervention gesturing to both roles he occupied in the exhibition. One literally had to walk through or around the edges of the image of destruction enforced by the war in Ukraine. Although dark, the painterly quality and manipulation of the photographic image, as with all of his recent work, softens the harsh visual as it swayed lightly in the gallery space. A contradiction felt also in mediated reality. Not only the image but our sense of reality was distorted moving through the exhibition. Behind the curtain, Yevgenia Belorusets, well-known for her war dairies presented an older work. “Please Don’t Take My Picture Or They’ll Shoot Me Tomorrow” (2015) is part of the series “Victories of the Defeated” which documents the lives of communities during the military conflict in Donbas (indicating too that this war has been ongoing) through photographs and texts. A two-sided sculptural installation, on one side the exaggerated large cover page of a fictional paper Today’s News, and on the other side a portrait of miner a filled up the center of the front space. Through irony—the paper’s subtitle reads “You’re reading a quality-looking newspaper with a seriously dubious name”—Today’s News criticizes the misinformation that the media spreads and how it corrupts the truth, another way in which our reality, be it digital or analog, is distorted.

WONNERTH DEJACO curated by Kilobase Bucharest

Alex Horghidan
Untitled [series Polyamory], 2020
graphite on paper framed
35 x 35 cm
Courtesy of the artist, TRIUMFAMIRIA, Museum of Queer Culture and Family Servais Collection

WONNERTH DEJACO opened its doors two years ago and although this was their first time participating in Curated by, their presence was strong. The group exhibition JOY ~ JOY ~ JOY ON THE PEPPERSIDE OF SUPRANFINITE was one of the few shows where the work completely took over; it was louder than the standard white cube aesthetic of the space, but in a way that was welcoming, meeting the viewers at their frequency. The curators, Dragos Olea and Sandra Demetrescu, who collaborate under the hybrid curatorial practice KILOBASE BUCHAREST, brought us dreams of a future in a utopian queer universe called Suprainfinite. Suprainfinite is a space imagined by the art collective Apparatus 22, which includes Olea, in 2015. It is used here in the fictional locale of Pepperside to contemplate hope and joy, and how those experiences can support our future on Earth. They utilized a science fictional approach to explore the idea of utopia, proposing that in radical imagination we find tools the that can facilitate change and evolution in the present. This attitude was visualized by a curatorial intervention Title for an Exhibition (2021) installed in the window and visible first from outside the gallery. In various languages, an LED loop said: “queer since the dawn of time” and “our queer forefathers” suggesting that queerness has always been present in the world. Inside, the “ultra fragile” Shields (2019-ongoing) adorned with tassels or stitching by Irina Bujor rounded off the corners of the first room. A soft voice seeped from behind them, sharing wishes that would change the violence in the realities of transgender people. In the second adjacent room, Irresistible (2021), a short film by Barbora Kleinhamplová in collaboration with Mistress Velvet, features the late queer dominatrix and their BDSM practice; as with their community organization and activist positions, Mistress Velvet used BDSM as a process to foster systemic change in the form of, for example, reparations by letting their white cis male clients read and study Black Feminist Theory. The curators made a point that queerness can become isolated in a bubble that to other communities is perceived as inaccessible or even violent. JOY ~ JOY ~ JOY aimed to not only leisurely depict joy but also the importance of notions of consent, care and comfort, which are of necessary concern to all people. These acts of care were scattered throughout the exhibition, in particular in the pencil drawings of Alex Horghidan’s Polyamory series (2020) in which groups of people, sometimes dressed sometimes not, but always in the comfort of a soft environment of grass, pillows, plants or a bed, and each other are portrayed at rest.

Frieze London Opens to Large Crowds With Visceral Sensations

Installation view, Patricia Domínguez solo exhibition “Indra’s Net,” curated by Sandhini Poddar, Cecilia Brunson Projects Frieze London booth 2022, Courtesy Cecilia Brunson Projects.
Photograph by Eva Herzog


text by Jennifer Piejko


The early crowd snaked through Regent’s Park in central London, pouring into the tents of the 19th annual Frieze Art Fair from the moment the doors opened. After a string of quiet art-fair seasons, the morning circus of 160 temporary galleries, pop-up cafes (city favorites Petersham Nurseries, Jikoni, and Bao among them) and champagne counters was seemingly full from day to evening.

Perhaps the nearly three years of online viewing rooms, PDF sales lists, and isolation have left us with a longing for the deeply personal as well as the three-dimensional, as the engaging paintings on view leaned into the visceral, from Romanian painter Marius Bercea’s wistful portraits of friends and figures, mostly women, from his native Cluj at Los Angeles and New York gallery François Ghebaly. Hints of the seams of social construction—such as the aftereffects of the country’s 1989 revolution and the resulting creep of consumer capitalism into Romanian society, modern femininity and womanhood, and alienation—are disclosed in the details of his paintings, whose stylings recall paintings by Impressionist artist Mary Cassat and Milan Kundera films. 

 

Marius Bercea
Untitled, 2022
Oil on canvas
40 x 50 cm
Courtesy François Ghebaly Gallery © Marius Bercea

 

Warsaw and Cologne gallery Wschód present a series of canvases by Polish artist Joanna Woś that depicts scenes from Renaissance painter Filippo Lippi’s fresco The Feast of Herod (1466), part of Stories of St. Stephen and St. John the Baptist inside the Prato Cathedral in Tuscany. The diaphanous figures in shades from sand to terra cotta share side glances and intimacies while seeing right past and through each other. At the other end of the scale, Gagosian presents a towering row of seven paintings by British artist Jadé Fadojutimi, timed with her solo exhibition “Can we see the colour green because we have a name for it?” at the Hepworth Wakefield in West Yorkshire. Neon lines and forms of abstracted foliage race across the canvas in pure, frantic saturation. 

Installation View, Joanna Woś, Galeria Wschód Frieze London booth 2022

Reaching out to visitors, works highlighting texture and dimensionality filled the fair, begging to be touched or crinkled in the hand: Shin Sung Hy at Gallery Hyundai (Seoul), Suki Seokyeong Kang at Tina Kim Gallery (New York), Joanna Piotrowska at Phillida Reid (London), Barbara Bloom and Karla Black at Gisela Capitain (Cologne), Acaye Kerunen at Pace, Rossella Biscotti at mor charpentier (Paris and Bogotá). It’s a scandalous feeling now that we’ve gotten accustomed to mediating nearly every work through a digital screen.

Installation View, Acaye Kerunen at Pace Gallery Frieze London booth 2022 © Pace Gallery, London 2022 
Photograph by Damian Griffiths, courtesy Pace Gallery 

Among the fair’s usual sections Focus and Editions, this year’s special section is “Indra’s Net,” curated by Sandhini Poddar from the Guggenheim Museum in Abu Dhabi. Titled after the ancient Buddhist and Hindu concept of dependent origination, illustrated by intertwined cords that hold a multifaceted jewel at each knot, where each jewel reflects every other jewel, connecting the entire universe. Works included here reflect connections and exchanges in language, history, ancestry, consciousness, and futurity. At New York gallery Jack Shainman’s booth, Richard Mosse’s work Flooded Municipality, Amazonas captures the environmental damage inflicted on the Brazilian Amazon in the craggy reds and blacks that eat away at a flooded residential neighborhood, chronicling ecocide by drone in his signature conceptual photographic technique. At London gallery Cecilia Brunson Projects, Chilean artist Patricia Domínguez’s works stem from her interest in fantastical ethnobotany. Trained in botanical illustration, she used her recent artistic residency at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland and time with a Peruvian plant healer to inform the hybrid foliage-and-black box paintings (with gemstones), sculptures, and video here. Seen together, it might offer a roadmap into our next dimension. See you in the line to get in there, too.  

Ahmet Öğüt Presents "A:PPOINTED D:IRECTORS" @ A:D: Curatorial in Berlin

Jump Up! , 2022 Ahmet Öğüt

Ahmet Öğüt
Jump Up! , 2022 
Installation, with 3 selected works from the museum collection,  3 trampolines 

A:PPOINTED D:IRECTORS by Kurdish-Dutch artist, Ahmet Öğüt at A:D:Curatorial deals with institutional critique as well as a number of sociopolitical precarities, questioning the role of art institutions and artists themselves.

“A museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. Open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection and knowledge sharing.”

—International Council of Museums, August 24th, 2022

This recently approved new definition of the museum by ICOM is very aspiring, yet still, some objectives are far from reality. Therefore, it is the role of art professionals to find new strategies to achieve these objectives. How may we balance our roles between addressing urgent issues and not falling back into the complicit patterns of the art world? Sometimes smaller institutions can enable strategies to experiment with new formats more easily.

Topics such as museum collections, exhibition displays, public interactions, and institutional representations are addressed throughout the show, using both playful and challenging strategies. Visitors can immediately become part of the show with the installation Jump Up! by jumping on small trampolines to see selected works, which hang above eye level. Another work, No Institutional Abuse Zone, marks the area but also tries to put the same standards and parallels between human affairs and artist-institution relationships. Resulting from a google search, Appointed Curators is a collection of closely cropped portraits underscoring the prevalence of curators who choose to represent themselves with arms crossed. Those who assume this posture are often perceived as being angry, closed off, or feeling overwhelmed. This ironic take on self-representation reminds us of the importance of care, transparency, and a welcoming culture in art institutions. A:PPOINTED D:IRECTORS will be on view from October 9th - December 15th at A:D: Curatorial: Kurfürstenstraße 142, 10785 Berlin.

portrait by Ateş Alpar

Ahmet Öğüt
Appointed Curators, 2022 
250cm x 200cm 
poster 

A Rich, Somber Undercurrent: Read Our Interview Of Alannah Farrell →

Alannah Farrell — the sexual awakening to colors and hues, to kinks and dreams. This queer, trans-identifying artist from rural New York gracefully depicts the real bodies of their queer scene in atmospheric paintings, the magic of which stems from the shapely emotional nuances of each subject. Here, their struggles are visible, but so are the celebrations. Though currently represented by Harper’s and Anat Ebgi, they've had an enduring journey to their current career, beginning as a child yearning for a creative outlet, from babysitter, to cashier, to model, to dungeon domme, and later, Cooper Union graduate, allowing their art to leap from the confines of their bedroom to their first show at The Painting Center in New York. With the vibrant bodies and milky pigments enclosed in these works, Farrell expresses the multifaceted layers of their subjects’ queer identities, supporting the normalization of all expressions of beauty and power within the LGBTQI+ community. We see these queer bodies and faces through a lens unfocused on the taboo fascination that society perpetuates. It is one that instead centers the subject and how they wish to be seen and heard. Undoubtedly a New Yorker, Farrell pursues these intimate scenes and perseverances throughout the city with heart. They allow us, the viewers, into these blissful connections. We sat down with Farrell to discuss their expansive ideas surrounding queer identity in art, the fluidity of life, and their newest solo exhibition, I Want to Thank you, at Harper’s Gallery in New York. Read more.

Theophanies Explores The Late Steven Arnold's Personal Mythologies @ Fahey/Klein In Los Angeles

Realized between 1981 and 1993, Steven Arnold’s tableau photography represents a confluence of his myriad other disciplines. This modality allowed him the freedom to fully realize his cinematic visions without outside influence or compromise. After sketching storyboards inspired by his dreams, a habit from his filmmaking days, Arnold would craft his tableaus using cardboard, seamless paper, metallic and patterned fabrics, cut paper, paint, and selections from his obsessive collection of antiques, costumes, makeup, and dime store finds. Finally, he would dress, paint, and pose his models within his tableau, bringing his vision to life, then captured with his Hasselblad, often utilizing multiple exposures. 

Theophanies is an exhibition of works curated as a limited retrospective of the late artist’s surrealist tableau photographs, supported by a small selection of drawings, paintings, sculpture, and films. A proud, prominent member of the LGBTQ community years before this moniker became part of our common vernacular, Arnold sadly died of AIDS in 1994. Most recently, he is the subject of a documentary, Steven Arnold: Heavenly Bodies, co-narrated by Anjelica Huston and Ellen Burstyn, which will be screened on September 21 at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Feliz. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with filmmaker Vishnu Dass, writer/editor Steffie Nelson, writer/filmmaker Jessica Hundley (The Library of Esoterica) and Nicholas Fahey of Fahey/Klein Gallery.

Theophanies is on view through September 24 @ Fahey/Klein Gallery 148 North La Brea Avenue