Nasan Tur Interrogates the Uses of Power through Lifelessness in Hunted @ Berlinische Galerie in Berlin

Nasan Tur deals with the political and social conditions of our time. His works are experimental arrangements that make ideologies, social norms and behavior patterns visible and expand them to include possibilities for individual action. To do this, he examines statements, gestures and images that he finds in the media and public space and condenses them into miniatures of current social crises and discourses. The focus is on the question of how predetermined role models influence us and when we are ready to cross boundaries and actively change social patterns in the face of oppression, powerlessness and manipulation.

New works were created for Hunted, his current exhibition at Berlinische Galerie, which deal with questions of the exercise of power and its legitimacy. Why do people kill? What violence lies within us, and how and under what circumstances is it activated? By arranging the works in space, Tur creates images that express an ambivalent attitude toward death and life. They range from confronting one's own inner demons to questioning hunters and the act of killing to the careful staging of lifeless animals in space.

Hunted is on view through April 1st at Berlinische Galerie, Berlin’s Museum of Modern Art, Photography and Architecture Alte Jakobstraße 124–128, 10969 Berlin.

Rachel Gregor Presents Summer as an Inescapable Purgatory for Teenage Girlhood in Still Summer @ Hashimoto Contemporary

Still Summer by Rachel Gregor, Stickleback and the female nude

Rachel Gregor, Stickleback, 2023. Images courtesy of Hashimoto Contemporary.

The rules of adolescent girlhood are convoluted and often unspoken, something painter Rachel Gregor seeks to highlight in her first solo exhibition with Hashimoto Contemporary, Still Summer. The Kansas City-based painter portrays the summer before ninth grade (remembered through overexposed point-and-shoot film photos) as the tense passage into true young adulthood: newfound independence is at odds with a lack of agency, infantilization discredits budding knowledge about the world. Based on versions of herself, the characters in these new paintings are wolves in sheep’s clothing, rebelling to escape their physical and psychological barriers, or at least survive the small hell of Arcadian juvenility.

Still Summer is on view through December 2 @ Hashimoto Contemporary, 2754 S La Cienega Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90034

 
 

Ken Gun Min Fuses a Cosmopolitan Personal History with Lush, Floral Landscapes in Sweet Discipline from Koreatown @ Shulamit Nazarian

Ken Gun Min presents Sweet Discipline from Koreatown at Shulamit Nazarian in Los Angeles

Images courtesy of Shulamit Nazarian

Shulamit Nazarian presents Sweet Discipline from Koreatown, an exhibition of new works by Ken Gun Min. In the artist’s newest paintings, lush, floral landscapes and sensitively rendered, imaginative portraits are adorned with beads and embroidery. Born in Seoul, South Korea, Min has led a global existence, moving from Zurich and Berlin to San Francisco before eventually settling in Los Angeles's Koreatown. This cosmopolitan personal history informs the social and political narratives of Min's work, which explores emotion, otherness, and an intimate connection to place.

The paintings in this exhibition exemplify Min's intersectional engagement with the nuances of queer experience as an Asian man and his deeply personal approach to often unexplored social spaces and histories. Yet even as he mines his own feelings and experiences, Min pulls a wide range of references and associations into the work to consider the ways that power, race, and sexuality play into both local and global geopolitics. Certain works reference the history of conflict between Asia and Europe, the dynamic history of relations between different minority groups in urban conflicts, and the intersection of sexual and racial prejudice. By exploring stories that span contemporary reality and earlier historical moments, the paintings expand outward from Min's personal journey through Los Angeles to address the sublime encounter of splendor and darkness in the human experience.

Sweet Discipline from Koreatown is on view through December 20 @ Shulamit Nazarian, 616 N. La Brea Avenue Los Angeles CA

Daniel Arnold: New York Life Is Sustained by Forward Motion @ New York Life Gallery

Attuned to moments in the city that many fail to notice, Daniel Arnold: New York Life documents the personalities who rush, stumble, and idle through every sidewalk, subway, bodega, park, beach, and ferry throughout the five boroughs. From his vantage point—a camera perched on scaffolding in the rain or nestled to his torso amidst a crowd—he creates a time capsule of the city that is simultaneously unsentimental and imbued with sublime oddity. 

Arnold’s photographs feature a broad cast of characters improbably brought together on the street. People who appear archetypal or stereotypical at first glance are revealed for their idiosyncrasies—exposing the uncanny nature of unassuming subjects. Through his candid lens, metropolitan scenes steeped in cliché are distilled back into the raw, bizarre, humorous, and miraculous.

In Arnold’s universe, there is no right moment, wrong moment, or perfect shot; there is only the impulse to load a new roll and take the next picture. His work is sustained by this forward motion. While each image is an index of a particular place and time, the breadth and scope of Arnold’s photographs form a composite image of city life today. In New York, Arnold has found an infinite muse


Daniel Arnold: New York Life is on view through December 22nd @ New York Life Gallery  167-169 Canal Street, Floor 5, New York,

Read Our Interview Of Artist & Curator Mieke Marple On Bridging the Digital & Traditional Worlds of Art →

Alida Sun, Southern Gothic Love Letters to My NSA Agent, 2023, courtesy of the artist, bitforms gallery, and PR for Artists. Image by Joshua White

NFT Tuesday LA co-founder and former Night Gallery co-owner, Mieke Marple is a Los Angeles-based artist and writer determined to navigate what she calls the “insurmountable chasm” between the physical and digital art worlds. 

In her passionate mission to reconcile both the analog and the digital, Mieke has recently curated an impressive exhibition titled Interreality, showcasing 35 artists from the pioneering digital space mixed in with traditional established artists. Produced by Steve Sacks, founder of bitforms gallery and Aubrie Wienholt, founder of PR for Artists, Interreality is simply a tour de force. 

A kindred spirit and peer curator, I was thrilled to interview Mieke to speak about the exhibition as we tackled notions of provenance, embodied experiences, collecting art and feminism. Read more.

Curt LeMieux "Heroes" @ White Box LA

 
 

WhiteBox.LA, renowned photographer Joshua White’s curatorial project, presents its second exhibition, Curt LeMieux: HEROES at The Desmond Tower from November 18 through November 30, 2023. A group of minimal, puerile paintings of classic LP albums, including the iconic album cover art from artists ranging from Dusty Springfield to Frank Sinatra, Patti Smith, The Rolling Stones, and Black Sabbath.

The works speak of LeMieux’s adolescent obsession with Rock & Roll imagery and his own teenage sexuality as he came of age on the outskirts of the rust belt on the late 70’s “Growing up working class on the outskirts the rustbelt, I had no access whatsoever to fine art. I had no idea that art existed. Nor did I relate much to regional expressions of culture. Large Green Bay Packer themed snow men littered every other yard. I first saw the cover of Meatloaf’s Bat Outta Hell while in a waiting room at Saint Luke’s Hospital in Duluth, Minnesota. I remember the experience with vivid detail. As a bored and impetuous child, this artwork excited me to my core. It was pop of color in an overwhelmingly drab setting. It was life and it was death stuffed together in one horrible little scene. It was dramatic and forceful. The paintings in Heroes paintings pay homage to the role music played in my development as a visual artist. I do not want to capture an exact likeness of a given album cover or a given artist. The forms are deliberately exaggerated. The characters are somewhat gawky and jovial; reflecting the ostentatious and campy attributes of the source material,” says LeMieux.

The exhibition incorporates live music, with a performance by Randy Randall of No Age Mark at the opening event on November 18 and a closing event featuring musician Ian Svenonius in conversation with LeMieux.

Allison Katz Creates a Cosmos of Disparate Images in Westward Ho! @ Hauser & Wirth

 

Allison Katz, Truth, 2023.

 

In ‘Westward Ho!’ Allison Katz creates a cosmos by overlapping disparate images and narratives from visual culture, her own past, and the coincidences that gather around her. The title firmly locates us, with tongue-in-cheek undertones, inside Hauser & Wirth in West Hollywood, California. It was Katz’s specific request to exhibit here, in a desire to engage with its associated cultural mythologies: ‘Hollywood is a big picture and I should like to know what it means to walk the walk, or drive the drive, of the Pacific coast, with its last–resort, up to the edge, atomized light...if this is the birthplace of the silver screen, then it’s a chance to test out painting’s irrefutable material and impure surface, its porous consciousness...’ The title blends historical and literary allusions, tracing back originally to the calls made by Elizabethan ferryman as they navigated the River Thames in search of passengers. As Katz writes: ‘I’m using Westward Ho! as a call out, a whoop of exuberance, a question hollered across time and tradition to see who and what answers, as if to test the idea that painting is a conversation.’

 

Allison Katz, Sheepish, 2023.

 

Throughout the exhibition Katz deploys a constantly evolving set of techniques and source materials. Echoes, rhymes and serendipities erupt; meaning is reordered and unexpected genealogies converge. ‘West’ is the neighborhood in which the gallery is located, the direction Katz’s apartment faces in London, a catch-all term for a geopolitical system in the midst of being challenged, and an alias for the pastoral patch of English countryside where she worked in residence (the West Country). While preparing for the exhibition she also visited the ruins of Pompeii (in the context of the institutional program Pompeii Commitment), where the discovery of wall paintings buried under ash continues to play a central role in the origin story of Western figuration.

Allison Katz, Sleeping and Weeping in the Fourth Style, 2023.

Westward Ho! is on view through January 5 @ Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood, 8980 Santa Monica Boulevard West Hollywood CA 90069

Vincent Ferrané Inverts the Intimate Solitude of the Bed in Embedded @ La Cité Gallery in Paris

 
 

In the series Embedded, presented by photographer Vincent Ferrané realized in collaboration with performer Pauline Lavogez, the confined space of a bed transforms into the profoundly minimalist stage of a performative expression, an "embodied experience." The project is a mosaic of images that relies on a unique space-time of experimentation, intertwining photographic and choreographic ideas much like on an editing table.

Derived from ordinary situations inherent to this intimate and universalizing playground haunted by our fantasies, fears, or passions, the created images offer enigmatic representations in seclusion: ethereal presences, bodies, and suspended faces seize hold of this original setting and transform it into a microcosm, a topography. A mattress-crater hollowed by a fist, clothes resembling geological folds, an improvised refuge beneath the sheets, and ghostly silhouettes come together to give shape to a bed-landscape.

Drawing its name from the words "bed" and "embedded," which in our media-driven age convey the idea of incorporation and embodiment, the series Embedded explores, within the perfect rectangle of the bed, the place of the body, both social and metaphorical. Between pose and pause, the series Embedded draws from the attributes of live performance to script a mosaic of black and white still images, framing the gaze on fragments of bodies, faded, trapped in the penumbra.

Vincent Ferrané
Embedded (2023)
Photograph
Courtesy of the artist

Embedded is on view November 9th through November 16th at La Cité Gallery, 71 rue Réaumur 75002, Paris.

Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island Charts Coco Fusco's Radical Path of Social Reckoning @ KW Institute in Berlin

Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island is the first major retrospective of Cuban-American artist Coco Fusco (b. 1960, US). For more than three decades, she has been a key voice in discourses on racial representation, feminism, postcolonial theory, and institutional critique. The exhibition seeks to trace the profound influence that Fusco’s work has had on contemporary art discourses in the Americas and Europe. To do so, it features a broad selection of the artist’s videos, photography, texts, installations, and live performances from the 1990s to the present day.

With her multidisciplinary practice, Fusco explores the ways that intercultural dynamics affect the construction of the self and ideas about cultural otherness. Her work is informed by multicultural and postcolonial discourses as well as feminist and psychoanalytic theories. Her investigation of intercultural dynamics has led her to develop art projects about ethnographic displays, animal psychology, sex tourism in the Caribbean, labor conditions in free trade zones, suppressed colonial records of Indigenous struggles, and the military interrogation techniques used in the war on terror. Her more recent work focuses on the relationship between poetry and revolutionary politics in Cuba.
The exhibition is loosely structured along these various interconnected themes. As such, Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island shows the breadth of Fusco’s artistic practice that is highly relevant considering current political and cultural debates in Germany and beyond.

Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island is on view through January 24th, 2024, at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin at Auguststraße 69, 10117 Berlin, Germany

Narrated Entirely In Her Own Voice, Sarah Lucas' Happy Gas Exhibition @ Tate Modern In London Is A Must See

 

Sarah Lucas
Bunny, 1997
Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London

 

Since 1990, Sarah Lucas has been creating art that distorts everyday objects to reveal their expressive qualities. In her exhibition, she uses items like bananas, lightbulbs, concrete, fish, a car, tights, chairs, tabloid newspapers, and cigarettes to explore universal questions about human existence, including origins, sex, class, happiness, and mortality. While her work is deeply personal, it also addresses common themes and could relate to anyone. The exhibition goes beyond her association with the 1990s Young British Art scene and offers a comprehensive look at her art over nearly 35 years, featuring self-portraits and her evolution as an artist.

 
 

Lucas challenges artistic conventions through her choice of subjects and materials, often manipulating them with care despite their casual appearance. Her work evokes a mood of grit, shock, and play, frequently touching on themes of sex, smoking, and food, punctuated by both dark and pleasurable elements. Lucas's subversion of social realism exposes the laughable and demeaning aspects of class and gender stereotypes. Her art combines explicit metaphors, unusual body forms, and oversized food to create a magical quality, resulting in a defiant, joyful, and vibrant atmosphere.

Happy Gas By Sarah Lucas is on view through January 14th, at Tate Modern, Bankside, London

Marina Abramović Hosts Her First Solo Show @ Royal Academy Of Arts In London

Marina Abramović
The Current, 2017
Video; 1 hour 35 mins
Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives

Originally trained as a painter at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, Marina Abramović turned to performance in the early 1970s and established the hallmarks of her practice: every day actions ritualised through repetition and endurance. She is a pioneer in using the live body in her work and has consistently tested the limits of her own physical and mental tolerance. Abramović has continued to navigate a space between the personal and the social, the conceptual and the existential, the physical and the spiritual. From 1975–88, Abramović collaborated with her then partner, the German artist Ulay, exploring male and female dualities. Returning to solo performances in 1989, the artist further tested boundaries with the creation of performative objects, performances to camera and audience participation.

The exhibition opens with Public Participation, featuring two works in which Abramović famously engaged directly with her audience: from the radical physical interaction of Rhythm 0, 1974 to the quiet stillness of The Artist is Present, 2010. Held 36 years apart, the two works encapsulate the development of her practice. Following on, The Communist Body foregrounds Abramović’s origins in the former Yugoslavia and how Communist ideals, experienced socially as well as personally, have informed her practice. Works featured here include Rhythm 5, 1974 (London, Lisson Gallery) and The Hero, 2001. The artist has spoken of the Balkan mind as ‘baroque’, in reference to what she describes as dramatic extremes of expression and emotion. Also included is Balkan Baroque, 1997, a work related to the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

Marina Abramović will be on view until January 1st at Royal Academy Of Arts, Burlington House, London

Read Our Interview of Puppies Puppies on the Occasion of Her Solo Exhibition @ The New Museum →

Puppies Puppies stands against a pu

Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo, known by the pseudonym Puppies Puppies, is revolutionizing trans and Indigenous visibility through her critically-acclaimed conceptual works of sculpture and performance art. Despite a very genuine and personal embodiment within the work, an air of mystery once shrouded her identity as she initially insisted on a level of anonymity rarely exhibited by artists, particularly of her generation. In late 2017, however, this shifted with the very first reference to the artist’s gender transition taking place in her Green (Ghosts) installation at Overduin & Co. in Los Angeles. Kuriki-Olivo and her then-boyfriend lived in the gallery during the hours it was closed, leaving only traces of their existence during the hours it was open. Here, she taped two estrogen pills to the wall, pointing toward her gender-affirming course of hormone therapy—a subtle gesture that gently opened the door of visibility. Employing the mundane, everyday objects that surround her life is a hallmark of Puppies Puppies’ practice and readymades are one of her favorite ways to reference the art historical canon. An initial easter egg of visibility has since swung the door open to a state of consensual voyeurism in Nothing New, her current solo exhibition at the New Museum where the artist is occupying the Lobby Gallery with nearly constant access to her comings and goings via video surveillance, live stream access, and glass walls overlooking a recreation of her bedroom. Puppies Puppies also points to elements of her multi-ethnic indigeneity—Taíno on her father’s side and Japanese on her mother’s—with the inclusion of objects and spiritual practices that connect her disparate lineages in a form of what the exhibition’s curator, Vivian Crockett, refers to as a memoryscape. Crockett got cozy in bed for her interview of Puppies Puppies on the eve of the exhibition’s inauguration to discuss their creative collaboration. Read more.

"Our Tears are Golden Glitter That Only Shines on Lost Souls": Fierce Queer Work from Turkey and its New Diasporas

Akış Ka, Harun Güler
IN LIMBO (2022)
Video still

by Cüneyt Çakırlar

The contemporary art scene in Turkey has accommodated a significant number of acclaimed queer and feminist artists who produce work exploring the politics of gender and sexuality in the country. The post-millennial expansion of art institutions and art collectors, as well as the development of the local art market’s international networks, have made the scene a vital territory of cultural capital, in which artists and their collaborating cultural practitioners, including academics and activists, channel their voices through art. While the neoliberal economy of art-as-capital and the extent to which it contributes to the precarization of cultural workers should be scrutinized, the academic, artistic, and cultural visibility of LGBTQ+ practices in Turkey raises critical possibilities to articulate questions of cross-cultural mobility and translation of sexual dissidence in arts. What I’m interested in here are the strategies of transposing queer aesthetics into a critical LGBTQ+ practice that does not merely insist on a local political context but also engages with – and unsettles – the geopolitics of the global contemporary art market and its “ethnographic turns.”

The post-millennial consolidation of LGBTQ+ activism, the increased public visibility of LGBTQ+ cultures, and the proliferation of political discourses on gender and sexuality in contemporary Turkey revealed what the political theorist Sinan Birdal considers “the fault-line between a liberal narrative based on universal human rights and democracy, and a conservative narrative based on particular values and identities” (2013). As the ruling class consistently and increasingly instrumentalizes “family values” and “general morals” in various legal frameworks that reinforce censorship, misogyny, transphobia, and homophobia, the marginalized communities that oppose the status quo mobilize various intersectional frameworks of resistance. Within these frameworks, LGBTQ+ activism appealed to forms of strategic political alliances, including the pro-Kurdish movement, the women’s movement, and anti-militarist resistance in the country. 

These intersectional platforms, which contest the state’s hegemonic discourse of militarism, nationalism, masculinity, and Islam, became dramatically visible in #OccupyGezi protests in 2013. The purges followed by the government’s post-Gezi framing of resistance-as-terrorism and the coup d’état attempt in 2016, resulted in a new wave of migration of skilled labor (mainly into Europe), in which academics, artists, curators, and other dissident practitioners have been the leading emigrating groups. This new diasporic presence of Turkey-affiliated cultural practitioners in European publics resulted in the formation of new academic, artistic, and curatorial collectives in various countries, notably Germany and the UK. Thus, to fully understand how LGBTQ+ cultural practices operate in Turkey (and expand internationally), one should pay attention to these new networks of solidarity and platforms of artistic practice that are informed by Turkish politics through the arts-academia-activism nexus in national and transnational settings. 

My previous work on the post-millennial LGBTQ+ art production in Turkey and its diasporas argued that these practitioners (e.g. Kutluğ Ataman, Taner Ceylan, Nilbar Güreş, Erinç Seymen, and Istanbul Queer Art Collective) have a particular politics of location that are informed by queerness, transnationalism, and intersectionality. Inspired by Irit Rogoff’s approach to “regional imaginings,” I argued that these artists “attempt both to activate and to actualize notions of location away from being ‘located’ by an authority of knowledge or a political authority:” rather than “trying to figure out what one’s identity might be as a given,” one should try “to produce a set of relationships in the world that might locate one” (Rogoff 2010).

The curatorial frameworks of the takeover events which have recently taken place in London, namely Screen Practices: LUBUNYA Dispatches at ICA London (2-4 June 2023) and Transpose BURN: Pit Party at Barbican Centre (15-17 June 2023), resonate considerably with my above-discussed account of queer cultural practices from Turkey and its diasporas. Their engagement with Turkey is informed by a transnational perspective that considers queer art as a practice of mobility, rather than a practice of identity that is authenticated only by the geopolitics of nation-states. These projects celebrate queer practitioners as active agents of cultural change rather than passive recipients of authoritarian oppression. 

ICA’s Screen Practices program included screenings of recent works I was already familiar with, such as the Turkey-born, Berlin-based researcher-pornographer Emre Busse’s Godasses Trilogy (2021-2), Gizem Aksu’s recent documentary 9/8fight41 (2022), Rüzgar Buşki’s #Resistayol (2016), and the performances by Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu and Istanbul Queer Art Collective. However, the presence of Istanbul-based performance artists Kübra Uzun (aka Q-bra) and Akış Ka in London, and their discursive, affective, and artistic contribution to the three-day program at ICA turned the takeover into a special happening. Their performances reinvigorated the screening program as a live archive of fierce queer practice rather than a mere re-presentation/documentation of Turkey-based queer culture and institutionally branded queer art practices to London-based audiences. 

Istanbul-based singer, songwriter, performance artist, and DJ, Kübra Uzun is an LGBTQIA+ rights activist, working in Turkey and also on various international platforms. LUBUNYA Dispatches at ICA London featured Uzun’s video performance Jülyet’s Habanera, which was produced by [alt]platform and premiered on [alt]cut YouTube Channel in March 2022. Originally composed by Georges Bizet (Habanera: L’amour est un oiseau rebelle, Carmen), the lyrics of Jülyet’s Habanera are rewritten by Uzun herself in lubunca, Turkish queer slang. In the video, Uzun impersonates their four famous personas (Kübra, Madam Sipsi, Dikiz Jülyet, and Butch Berna), which firstly were seen at their Koli Kanonu [aka Fuckbuddy Canon]. Queering, in localizing, local and global canons of music, Uzun’s performances articulate discourses of queer/trans empowerment by subverting the stereotypes of (Turkish) masculinity and femininity. While these performances can also be considered drag acts, Uzun’s trans-feminist interventions gain additional critical layers through first-person storytelling, taking various forms of reclaiming queer lives and histories. Such reclamations are dramatically visible in the artistic collaborations Uzun were involved with, such as Cruising Gezi Park: An Oral History produced in collaboration with Simon(e) van Saarloos (presented at Refresh Amsterdam exhibition, Amsterdam Museum, 2020).  

Kübra Uzun
Jülyet’s Habanera (2022)
Video still

Reflecting on the murder of Jan Majdanski (2017) in a cruising spot of Oosterpark, Amsterdam, Simon(e) van Saarlos questions the Dutch police’s response to the incident with the use of extra lights in the park as a surveillance tool: “Whose ideas of safety and pleasure rule the city?” The artist’s engagement with the policing of sex and sex work (and the ways in which LGBTQI+ bodies experience, inhabit, and shape the public space) informs Cruising Gezi Park: An Oral History, a project of collaborative storytelling with Kübra Uzun. Uzun and van Saarloos take a nightly walk around Gezi Park in Istanbul, where Uzun shares her memories of cruising in the 90s and her experience of Gezi Park protests in 2013. Through the recording of the exchange between the two artists, Uzun’s story turns into a history of the transformation of not only Gezi Park but also themselves as trans activists. As van Saarlos also notes, “Most histories are not documented through text or legislation; they depend on intergenerational intimacies and informal storytelling.” 

Simon(e) van Saarloos and Kübra Uzun
Kübra in Gezipark, Istanbul. October 2020
Image from Cruising Gezi Park: An Oral History (2020)

 Uzun sees every occasion of queer performance and storytelling as a form of activism that opens spaces for resistance, solidarity, and empowerment. Hence, their performances bridge the gap between their personal life and the collective experience of the queer community in Turkey and its diasporas. Given the crushing effects of the pandemic on Istanbul’s queer spaces, the reach of such relationality gains particular importance in Uzun’s recordings, digital/multi-media projects, and live-streamed performances, such as A Trans History Sung (2020) and ALAN2020 (2020). Following the gradual fragmentation of the activist community in Istanbul as a result of the new – post-purge – routes of queer migration (to European destinations including Berlin and London), Uzun’s intimate engagement with the queer community and their blurring of sectoral/institutional boundaries between arts, culture, and activism, made their contribution to the ICA takeover in London (as a DJ, artist, and community interlocutor) particularly meaningful.   

Kübra Uzun
A Trans History Sung (2020) 
Video still

A Trans History Sung is a powerful example of Uzun’s practice, which can also be considered a precedent for the artist’s multi-media performances of queer platform-making during her residency in the UK (including gigs/events at Nottingham Contemporary, Dalston Superstore, and Engine Room Studios). To produce “a digital monument” before her move from Istanbul to Berlin, A Trans History Sung features Uzun’s one-hour-long interactive performance live-streamed via Instagram. Throughout Uzun’s singing and live conversations with friends, the performance embodies flow and fluidity in multiple affective registers, i.e. the artist’s gender transition, their decision to move to Berlin, their exposure to the flow of live content produced by the queer community in Turkey and beyond (during the performance), and their expression of nostalgia/melancholy and joy through singing. This dense affective texture in Uzun’s performance combining singing and queer storytelling considerably resonates with the practices of Justin Vivian Bond, David Hoyle, and Lady Rizo.   

In addition to Uzun’s work, LUBUNYA Dispatches’ screening program of video performances (curated by London-based artists-led Queer Art Projects) also included Harun Güler’s video In Limbo (2022) featuring gender-nonconforming performance artists Akış Ka, MustKika, Meli Bendeli, and Özgür Uzay. Güler’s video locates each artist in a mise-en-scène that is associated with Orientalism and its normatively gendered tropes. While each performance creates a friction between body and space, the video’s poetic essayism celebrates, in spectacularizing, gender-nonconforming bodies to transform this friction into a frisson of excitement. Akış Ka’s appearance in a hammam, a setting that is usually associated with homoeroticism and masculinity through tropes of Orientalism, is a powerful moment in the video. Rubbed and washed by two bath attendants (tellak), the artist’s body, painted in blue, is matched by their poetic voice-over: “The fairy of the night feeds on stardust. (…) They put dark matter mascara on… Sliding down from a comet back to the Earth… Leaking from their chest, drop by drop, stray meteor showers… Eyes sting, tears flow… Our tears are golden glitter that only shines on lost souls.” Güler uses water and glowing skin to articulate a queer erotic of flux: Akış’s shining other-worldly blue body is matched with Meli Bendeli’s jewelry, Özgür Uzay’s top surgery scar underwater, and MustKika’s belly-dancing costume. MustKika’s queer appropriation of belly dancing is also featured as part of the performances commissioned for Transpose Pit Party: BURN at Barbican. Combining belly dance with contemporary drag, the artist subverts gender-normative traditions of Middle Eastern performance arts as they re-interpret the historical figure of the zenne in contemporary settings. 

MustKika
Transpose Pit Party: BURN
Performance at Barbican Centre, London, UK
Photo by Holly Revel 

A number of artists featured in Lubunya Dispatches have also contributed to the recent edition of Transpose, which was founded by artistic director CN Lester in 2011 to “celebrate, promote, and platform the wide-ranging talents of the UK trans community.” Curated by performer and musician Dani Dinger, the 2013 edition dedicated its program to cross-cultural trans solidarity by featuring anarchist poet Kell w Farshéa, DJ Ifeoluwa, drag artist i-Gemini, Akış Ka, MustKika, and Kübra Uzun, in a performance event that took place at Barbican, London. As part of this program, Akış Ka produced a performance piece, INTERNALS, which shares their story of self-realization as a non-binary artist born in Turkey. Moving in and out of a web of textiles installed on stage, Akış’s naked body and voice articulate a performative crafting of the queer self through head-on collisions against societal norms of gender and sexuality. 

Akış Ka
INTERNALS (2023)
Performance for TRANSPOSE PIT PARTY: BURN, Barbican, London, UK
Photo by Holly Revell

Collision effectively describes Akış Ka’s practice, which operates across performance art, activism, and radical drag. An active member of the İstanbul LGBTI+ Pride Week committee (2016-2019), Akış performed in various Istanbul-based cultural events ranging from the public programs of contemporary art institutions (e.g. SALT Beyoğlu) to live performance venues (e.g. Babylon) and queer clubs (e.g. Şahika). Comparable to Kübra Uzun’s practice, Akış’s work crosses sectoral and institutional boundaries, the versatility of which was considerably visible in the performances they produced as part of their UK residency (June-August 2023) at the ICA, the Ugly Duck, Dalston Superstore, and the Engine Room Studios.   

 

Akış Ka
Shall I Give You a Secret? (2023)
Performance for the opening party of Screen Practices: Lubunya Dispatches, ICA, London, UK

 

 4 out of 13 music videos from Kırıta Kırıta (2021), a project by the Istanbul-based Dramaqueer Art Collective (curated by Serdar Soydan) were also showcased at the Barbican as part of the Transpose Pit Party’s digital program. Founded in 2015, the collective’s key mission is to produce alternative, queer legacies of gender expression and body politics in art and popular culture. Kırıta Kırıta brings together drag queens, who lip-sync and perform to kanto songs from the 1930s, revealing queer connections across different historical periods through dance and music. With its roots in Western music, kanto - as a genre of performance-as-artistic-entertainment in the late Ottoman period – employs humor, flirtation, and excess to navigate and queer the ideological ambivalences of modernization experienced during the transition from Ottoman Empire to the Republic. In their statement introducing these performances to Barbican’s audiences, Queer Art Projects notes that Kırıta Kırıta is a project that “traces the connections between generations of queer and minority performers, censorship, and resistance through popular entertainment in a turbulent culture that has been sashaying between the East and the West for centuries.” One of the videos in the project features the performance of “Kanamam / I Won't Be Deceived” by Cake Mosq - an Istanbul-based queer performer, an impressive example articulating kanto’s transhistorical affinities with drag performativity. Lip-syncing to Neriman Hanım's song in a BDSM setting against the backdrop of an iconic Istanbul cityscape, Cake Mosq’s 30s-style suit, high heels, and makeup transforms into a flapper dress during the performance while the performer dances around their slave on an electric chair adorned with a sparkling headpiece and veiled with bright blue tissue eyes. 

“There is no question but that we must fight the unspeakable violence we incur from the society in which we find ourselves,” says Douglas Crimp in his influential essay titled “Mourning and Militancy” (2002). “If we understand that violence is able to reap its horrible rewards through the very psychic mechanisms that make us part of this society,” Crimp continues, “then we may also be able to recognize – along with our rage – our terror, our guilt, and our profound sadness. Militancy, of course, then, but mourning too: mourning and militancy.” Here, Crimp addresses the queer community recovering from the traumatic losses they experienced during the AIDS crisis. However, cultural practitioners like Kübra Uzun and Akış Ka, who perform a migratory aesthetic of queer existence and contribute fiercely to the resilience of their queer communities (in the face of crushing autocracies and/or increasingly oppressive transphobia), show us that “mourning and militancy” is a lifelong endeavor for queer people, politicizing – in owning – their joy and grief, and transcending pride and victimhood.   

Cüneyt Çakırlar is Associate Professor of Film and Visual Culture at Nottingham Trent University, UK. His current research practice focuses on gender and sexuality studies, global visual cultures, and transnational horror film. Çakirlar has taught on queer arts and film theory at University College London (UK), Boğazici University (Turkey), Koç University (Turkey), and Istanbul Bilgi University (Turkey). His articles appeared in various international peer-reviewed journals including Critical Arts, Cineaction, [in]Transition, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Paragraph, and Screen. He co-edited a volume about cultures of sexual dissidence in contemporary Turkey, namely Cinsellik Muamması: Türkiye’de Queer Kültür ve Muhalefet (2012), co-authored Mustang: Translating Willful Youth (2022), and co-translated Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter (1993) into Turkish (Pinhan, 2014). Çakırlar has also worked with various arts institutions and curatorial collectives based in Turkey, Germany, USA, and UK. He currently leads a British Academy project on “Transnational Horror, Folklore, and Cultural Politics” (2021-2023).  

Aryana Minai's Roses in a Garden of Ruins @ Allen & Eldridge in New York

 
 


text by Hannah Sage Kay

Pulped paper bricks chart a haptic course between Aryana Minai’s eight Life Forms (all 2023) on view at James Fuentes’ lower-level project space. This rather soft, somewhat squishy pathway opens onto the wall under each Life Form for a reflective pause—during which their material simplicity and repeated compositional structure nevertheless conjure a mysterious world of color, and texture, that enshrines, within decay, seeds of new life. 

When pressed into a thick mess of pulped paper on a wire screen, a discarded textile woodblock from Tehran produces the architectural configuration undergirding Minai’s intimately scaled vignettes. In a rich array of browns, oranges, muddy blues, purples, and an unexpected chartreuse, the water-based dyes that Minai mixes with recycled paper in a blender to create pulp rise to the surface with an effervescent luminosity that remains even after the water has evaporated and the paper dried. Amongst the low-relief pattern left behind by the woodblock, a central archway frames the translucent skeleton of a rubber plant leaf from the artist’s mother’s garden. In the hollow pocket of this orifice are remnants of torn paper collected from the floor of Minai’s studio—the veritable seeds of her work; predicated on use and reuse, growth and decay, they take on a dual significance. Not only reflective of the binary cycles of her material processes, the seeds also allude, however subtly, to family, home, and the charged state of women’s rights in her native Iran. The exhibition’s title similarly speaks to a slogan adopted by the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement: You may have burned our gardens but we kept the seeds! 

These visual and metaphorical allusions may be evident to some and obtuse to others, so it is rather Minai’s poetic material configurations, her imbrication of architectural and illusionistic space, her threading through of specific cultural morphologies into broadly accessible and yet deeply personal terrain that proffer an ensnaring mystery and, as such, sustained investigation.

Roses In A Garden of Ruins is on view through October 14 at Allen & Eldridge (James Fuentes project space).

Young-jun Tak Queers Religious Artifacts and Disassembles Mechanical Masculinity in His Exhibition @ JS Foundation in Berlin and Düsseldorf

At both the Düsseldorf and Berlin locations of the Julia Stoscheck Foundation, Berlin-based artist Young-jun Tak presents two recent films, Wish You a Lovely Sunday (2021) and Wohin? (2022), which will play in a loop in the galleries. Both shot in Berlin, these works consider how place, architecture, movement, and belief inform community and queerness.

 Wish You a Lovely Sunday (2021) juxtaposes two locations in Berlin: the church Kirche am Südstern and the queer club SchwuZ. Invited by the artist, two choreographers and two dancers were paired to create a new choreography for each space and assigned a different Bach piano piece for four hands. After days of rehearsals and once the choreography was complete, their originally designated venues were swapped for the filming. The participants therefore had to adapt their choreographies spontaneously according to the architectural features and atmosphere of the other space. By setting these two sites in dialogue, Tak proposes an improbable coexistence of religious practice and club culture. Tak is intrigued by the similarities between churches and clubs because they both involve specific rituals, behavioral norms, and attitudes closely linked to the space and its role. Over the course of Wish You a Lovely Sunday, the combination of the characters’ bodily presence and their navigation of their respective surroundings starts to shift the meaning of each location, eventually revealing tensions that were not apparent on the surface. In the church, the pair’s game of looking or not looking at one another while roaming around the columns and altar expresses unmistakable sensations of longing and desire, denial and prohibition.

In the film Wohin? (2022)—“Where to?” in German—the camera focuses on the rearview mirrors of cars that are driving on the Autobahn near Berlin. Throughout the film, various objects hung from the mirrors of each car become visible in the frame, from Christian rosaries and Buddhist prayer beads to a typical German air freshener, Wunderbaum. The rearview mirrors also reflect situations taking place on the back seat: a man gazes out of the window, checks his phone, or dozes off; two men kiss romantically. Prior to filming, Tak spoke with the actors about the many facets of the German Autobahn—an ideological project of the Third Reich and a feat of national infrastructure, as well as a playground for the projections of hypermasculinity, and a significant site for gay cruising. These mixed aspects are reinforced by the soundtrack, which pairs organist Andreas Sieling from the Berlin Cathedral with British countertenor Tim Morgan, who together reinterpret Kraftwerk’s legendary song “Autobahn” from 1974. While Sieling is peddling away at his huge organ with over 7,000 pipes, some of which are thirteen meters long, Morgan repeats the simple lyric “autobahn” in his fluid, high-pitched song, in contrast to the organ’s mechanical and militaristic rhythm.

Double Feature: Young-jun Tak is on view through December 17th at the Julia Stoschek Foundation, Leipziger Strasse 60, D-10117 Berlin, and JSF Düsseldorf, Schanzenstrasse 55, 40549 Düsseldorf.

Subjects Rebel Against the Confines of the Camera in Unbound: Performance As Rupture @ JS Foundation in Berlin

The group exhibition Unbound: Performance as Rupture examines how different generations of artists have called upon the body in relation to the camera to refuse oppressive ideologies, disrupt historical narratives, and unsettle concepts of identity.

The exhibition traces various intersections of performance and video art from the late 1960s to today, focusing on how they create specific forms of rupture, fracture, and pause. In contrast to Peggy Phelan’s definition of performance as a live art characterized by its immediate disappearance, Unbound centers the use of the camera and its apparatus to record and direct the performance itself. By willfully conflating the presence of performance and the virtuality of the image, the artists question a fundamental paradox—or representational gap—between the performing subject, whose complex identity can never be depicted fully, and the camera as a violent tool that tries to capture, contain, and classify them. Many of these works expose and negate the colonial gaze perpetuated by the camera, while simultaneously utilizing time-based technologies, in order to create otherwise impossible connections across spaces and temporalities. In addition to performance documentation and performance-for-the-camera, the exhibited artworks offer investigations into contemporary image economies that draw attention to how bodies move through or evade physical and digital spaces.

Unbound: Performance as Rupture is on view through July 28th, 2024, at the Julia Stoschek Foundation, Leipziger Strasse 60, D-10117 Berlin.

Read An Interview of Nina Hartmann by Leo Cocar on The Occasion Of Her Exhibition at Silke Lindner →

 

portrait by Alexander Rotonodo

 

Nina Hartmann navigates a diverse array of artistic mediums, seamlessly weaving her connection to music into her creative endeavors. Her work serves as a bridge, melting the divide between mysticism and critical thought. Within her conceptual pursuits, one encounters a unique blend of archival imagery, elusive symbols, screen prints, and Xerox collages. It’s in these varied forms of media that the synergy between visual artistry and musical expression effortlessly unfold. Employing deliberate restraint, Hartmann eschews superfluous elaboration about her work. She entrusts the observer with discovering the magical quality which resides in the gap between the art and viewer. Hartmann treats the output of her mind as an algorithm; it becomes a framework for further artistic computation. Her work delves into the depths of the subconscious, revealing concepts characterized by their infinitude. Her perspective extends to the creatively unconventional, where she intriguingly regards conspiracy theories as societal relics worthy of study—an open-mindedness which enunciates her versatility as an artist. A fusion of the modern mythological emerges, as Hartmann recycles recurring themes that persist in our collective consciousness. Through her exploration of spiritual phenomena, she invites us to delve into the enigmatic, prompting us to seek understanding in realms beyond the real. Click here to read more.

crosslucid Manifests Human Stories through Artificial Intelligence in Dwellers Between the Waters @ ACUD Galerie in Berlin

‘Dwellers Between the Waters’ (2023) is conjured as a series of hybrid rituals that mediate the space between physical presence, trauma, memory, healing, and virtuality. Polyphonic in its artificially intelligent framework, Dwellers Between the Waters could be experienced as a happening that is chanted by various elemental entities such as waters, winds, earth, air, algorithm... as well as poetry, history, magic, human and more-than-human creatures. This happening of digital rituals questions the singularity of humanist perception of reality. Co-performing with artificial intelligence, it attempts to create alternative epistemologies and outlooks on (so-called) reality through rendering multi-focal narratives and embedding the psycho-magical practice in forms of living ‘sigils’.

Combing artificial intelligence with the practice of magic and alchemy, Dwellers Between the Waters seeks possible solutions in response to the traumas of the contemporary anthropos, and examines how artificial intelligence, in terms of artistic practice, remains integral to our contemporary condition, that is, the ever-evolving climate crisis and the sixth extinction of species coupled with wars, inflation, and capitalist exploitation. By evoking, cultivating, and connecting various forms of consciousness in the virtual realms, Dwellers Between the Waters invites the ‘dwellers’ who inhabit in and among ‘realities’ to share their stories and experiences, which then feed back to (so-called) reality as evolving strings materializing across both physical and virtual domains to bring novel perspectives for further changes.

Dwellers Between the Waters is on view through October 8th at ACUD Galerie, Veteranenstraße 21, 10119 Berlin.

Teresa Baker's "From Joy to Joy to Joy" Recontextualizes Traditional Materials With Modern Discourse

text by Tara Anne Dalbow

If art historian Simon Schama’s assertion is correct that “landscapes are culture before they’re nature” and “scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock,” then when Teresa Baker, a member of the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes, surveys the Northern Plains she sees far more than meets the eye. The nine technicolor tapestries included in From Joy to Joy to Joy offer a glimpse beneath the visible surface of her ancestral homeland at a terrain imbued with ancient meanings, enriched by tradition and ritual, and animated by that which is sacred and ineffable. Poised between the past and present, recollection and reality, the physical and the spiritual, Baker’s chimerical landscapes inspire a poignant commentary on the ways history, social sensibilities, memory, and mythology mediate our experience of nature.

At first glance, the viewer might find the textiles’ base material, Astroturf, surprising. They’d be right to assume that someone raised nomadically across the national parks of the Midwest wouldn’t have had many encounters with the imitation grass. It wasn’t until Baker moved to Texas a few years ago that she discovered the vibrant, short-pile synthetic turf. Sturdy enough to support layers of paint, weavings, sticks, and stones yet malleable enough to be manipulated into unusual, organic shapes, the plastic mats freed her from the rigid constraints of traditional canvas. The mimetic texture, capable of conjuring wide-open plains and vast grassy fields, alleviated the burden of representation and encouraged abstract experimentation. 

Perhaps the fiber’s most compelling quality is the tension it enacts with the natural embellishments. The ultra-contemporary turf, indicative of an age beholden to plastic and artifice, tempers the traditional materials and recontextualizes them within a modern discourse. Yarn, willow, and buckskin, resources used for thousands of years by Indigenous peoples, are dispensed like paint to create mesmerizing gestures, patterns, and shapes across the shaggy surface. Despite being restricted to the materiality of yarn to generate variation in her lines and marks, Baker renders a convincingly painterly effect that’s both innovative and recognizable. Nods to certain expressionists, including Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler, can be found throughout the exhibition alongside techniques, patterns, and symbols culled from Mandan and Hidatsa customs and craftsmanship. 

While the compositions resist narrative, the haptic engagement with the surface texture, the coloration, and the use of organic shapes ground them in the realm of landscapes and topographical maps. One can identify a winding river in Spring Unforeseen, an island in the middle of a lake in No Walls, or a parched field in Yellow Prairie Grass. At times, the individual threads that bisect the picture plane appear as longitude and latitude lines; other times, they read like hiking trails or the boundaries of various plots of crops. Dappled strands of yarn arranged side by side mimic the fluidity of water, and layers of paint imitate shifting patterns of light and shade. Baker relies on the emotional freight of her color palette to modulate between the feeling of a landscape and the landscape itself. Indigo, as evocative of the ocean and the night sky as it is of melancholy and despair. 

Where the materials resist domination, the strings fray, the Astroturf emerges beneath the painted veneer, and the rawhide curls around the edges, the tapestries feel most alive, charged with an energy and agency of their own invention. Even affixed to the gallery walls, there’s a sense of perpetual unfurling as if the works are still engaged in the act of becoming. To see them this way is to see them as products of a dynamic relationship between artist and material, not a subjugation or domination of the former by the latter. The metaphorical jump from the material to the land itself is difficult to ignore, rendering them poignant examples of symbiotic stewardship. 

On the afternoon of my visit, a rogue red ant crawled assiduously across the brilliant green field in Unwritten. For just a moment, I experienced that exhilarating awareness of being unfathomably small but fundamentally connected to something unfathomably vast and irrefutably miraculous that I’d previously assumed only the grandeur of nature could provoke.

From Joy to Joy to Joy is on view through October 14 @ de boer 3311 E. Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles

Dickon Drury Mines Diverse Corners of Still-Life Painting in An Egg in Your Shoe @ Shulamit Nazarian

Installation view of An Egg in Your Shoe. Courtesy of Dickon Drury and Shulamit Nazarian.

Shulamit Nazarian is currently featuring An Egg in Your Shoe, the gallery’s first solo exhibition by UK-based painter Dickon Drury. The artist’s thematically rich, meticulously detailed paintings mine diverse corners of art history and the genre of still-life painting to delve into themes of self-sufficiency, preservation, and regeneration with tenderness and humor.

Drury's latest series of oil paintings on linen invites viewers to contemplate the complex relationship between material possessions and a sense of home amid an uncertain future. The still lives present collections of objects that work like visual puzzles, prodding the viewer to piece together clues about the mysterious inhabitants of these scenes. Drury's practice seeks the humor and idiosyncrasy embodied in our selection of material possessions, and his research has often looked to the supplies collected by apocalypse preppers. Boxes in the process of being packed or unpacked evoke a sense of urgency and an impending move, while rolls of bubble wrap allude to themes of protection and value for one's beloved objects. The compositions present their diverse groupings of objects democratically, without a hierarchical division between a whistle, a lighter, or a high-end ceramic vase. Without a human figure in sight, Drury's paintings offer an imaginative narrative played out in the background by the invisible, implicit inhabitants of his eccentric world.

 
 

An Egg in Your Shoe is on view through October 28 @ Shulamit Nazarian, 616 N La Brea Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90036