Sosa Joseph Devil’s hour, by the river, 2025
Some landscapes are not merely seen, but remembered. In Sosa Joseph’s canvases, rivers overflow, rain does not simply fall; it seeps into bodies, homes, and time. These paintings do not so much narrate the past as they establish a state of memory that revives it. Figures sometimes become distinct, sometimes fade; like memories, they oscillate between clinging and vanishing. Read more.
Installation view, Dan Flavin: Grids, David Zwirner, New York, January 15–February 21, 2026.
Courtesy David Zwirner
Visiting David Zwirner’s new Dan Flavin exhibit feels more like exploring an incandescent expanse than walking through a gallery. Every room contains just one or two of his fluorescent installations, giving each of them the space to settle and saturate the ceiling and walls. The ongoing exhibition focuses on Flavin’s grid pieces, which are a denser and more complex development of the spare, one or two-bulbed installations that first brought the artist to recognition.
Flavin called his works “situations,” a term that underscores their interdependence with space and context. The word also hints at their delicacy: the light bulbs can always be switched off, the lamps replaced. What matters is not the bulbs themselves, but your experience encountering them: the bulbs of colors radiating off the grids, suffusing the white walls, and one’s own body drifting through the space.
The first room holds the artist’s 1987 untitled (in honor of Leo at the 30th anniversary of his gallery) — one of many pieces dedicated to his longtime dealer, Leo Castelli. Three identical, five-by-five grids adjoin, and each horizontal lamp glows in one shade of the rainbow. On the floor below, the images reflect on the concrete, radiating in an ombre duplicate.
As you walk closer to the structure, the reflection on the floor recedes. As you retreat, the ombre reemerges. The grids themselves are not changing, of course, but your image of them does. Perception reveals itself to be—to use Flavin’s word—situational.
Behind the installation, a purple-pink light bathes the wall. Flavin has been described as a painter because of the way his installations color everything near. But painting feels slightly too vague and inexact as an analogy. The light is soft and diffuse. The neon grids light the walls, saturating them in radiant pastel shades so definitively that they erase the boundary between artwork and space.
In the following room, two grids appear in adjacent corners with opposing color schemes. One is pink and green; the other is blue and yellow. Each reflects the opposite color combination on the wall behind (the pink/green one has a blue/yellow reflection, and vice versa). Whereas in the previous work, you encounter the effect of the light and its source simultaneously, here you first encounter the effect, and only upon walking up close to the grid can you notice that there are lightbulbs on the backside, responsible for the reflection.
Installation view, Dan Flavin: Grids, David Zwirner, New York, January 15–February 21, 2026.
Courtesy David Zwirner
Flavin’s work centers on a compelling paradox: the grids themselves occupy very little space, yet his work fills the entire room. They implicate their container in the completion of the work itself. This use of light set him free from the boundaries of a canvas or 3D form.
His oeuvre also ensnares the viewer’s body as a significant part of the encounter. If you stand close enough, you’ll feel the warmth of the electricity. And if you stare long enough, your eyes will see an afterimage.
Flavin disliked it when critics overanalyzed his work or ascribed excess meaning to it. There’s humor in the fact that he chose a medium at which you’re discouraged from looking for too long. But if you do, you’ll notice an afterimage; it isn’t quite the work itself, but it isn’t entirely separate from it either.
Dan Flavin: Grids is on view through February 21 at David Zwirner Gallery, 537 West 20th Street, New York.
Courtesy of Christopher Wool
Walking into Christopher Wool’s See Stop Run exhibit in Marfa, you’re first confronted by a massive, spiderweb tangle of cast pipes. The sculpture sprawls across the center of the room without a clear point of origin: knotted and unruly. It feels like some kind of infrastructural system, rather than a single object, mirroring the subjects that fill Wool’s nearby photographs of old tires, scattered debris, and everything in between. To Wool, the natural world is inseparable from human waste.
The show spans four rooms across two neighboring buildings, holding a mix of sculptures, photographs taken locally in Marfa, and paintings.
When curator Anne Pontégnie first conceived of See Stop Run, she said that she wanted to get away from “the neutrality of contemporary art spaces, galleries, and institutions” and find somewhere in New York City—where the show originally ran—where the work “could interact with something other than a blank slate.” The show’s first iteration took place in an old, derelict office building in downtown Manhattan, and critics praised how the paintings and sculptures engaged with the space’s cracked floors, exposed wiring, and peeling surfaces, creating what a New York Times critic described as “visual rhymes.”
When the exhibition moved to Marfa in the spring of 2025 and took up space in the Brite Building, the presentation changed. It’s now in exactly the kind of pristine, white-walled space that Pontégnie wanted to avoid. Only one of the rooms contains the same wildness as the New York show, and this has the impact of lessening the dialogue between Wool’s work and its surroundings from shouts to whispers.
Courtesy of Christopher Wool
The exhibition here in Marfa is thoughtfully curated, but it doesn’t feel accurate to describe it as controlled chaos exactly, because what makes Wool’s work so compelling is how little it wants to be controlled. Most of the show does unfold in white gallery walls, but one room upstairs has a kitchenette, and another resembles the environment of the original New York show. Here, there are holes left behind by old nails and cracks in the floors. The wear and tear of the building—alongside the refrigerator and sink—feels as meaningful as the art itself because Wool’s work never seeks to dominate the space; it only asks to live in it.
One of the clearest examples is a wiry sculpture suspended from the ceiling, held by a black cord looped over a silver hook. It’s not immediately apparent where the artwork ends, and the means of display begins. Is the cord a part of the sculpture or just what’s holding it up? Wool seems to be testing the limits of his own work.
If a wire slipped loose or the floor cracked underfoot, or perhaps if one of his hanging sculptures fell to the ground, that wouldn’t change anything. It might even add something. And even though the Marfa iteration of See Stop Run offers less in terms of its setting, it ultimately delivers something even more compelling.
Courtesy of Christopher Wool
Courtesy of Christopher Wool
This comes in the form of three outdoor sculptures, which require a short drive to see, that feel like both the show’s natural conclusion and its highlight. Placed directly in the Chihuahuan desert, the works move forward from interacting with artificial space into dealing directly with the natural world as it is.
The steel forms resemble things already scattered across the landscape— tumbleweeds and tree roots and branches—but unlike the natural parallels, these ones don’t move or decay. Gazing at them, you can feel the human hands that meticulously crafted them. And meanwhile, the real desert continues its course all around them, indifferent. The sun rises and sets. The mountains stand tall.
In this way, Wool sets up a confrontation between two kinds of being: the natural world, which is alive precisely because it changes and dies, and his hand-crafted sculptures, which can endure only by refusing to be part of that cycle. Standing among these works as the wind forcefully blows and the Texas sun beams, you hover between these two modes of existence: the steel that combats mutability and the real, organic matter that changes, blows away, disappears.
See Stop Run is on view through Spring 2027 in the Brite Building, Marfa, Texas.
From the White House X account
Following the previous essay, we find that while in the more contemplative corners of the contemporary art world, spatialized philosophical questions endeavor to idiosyncratically suture the anomic wounds of modernity, the more statistically significant mode of visual culture today can be primarily understood as operational (in a less philosophical sense): media produced and instrumentalized through computational vectors with clearly defined goals—largely financial, increasingly automated, and frequently without the necessary involvement of human agents and audiences. The late artist and theorist Harun Farocki offered the concept of operational images to describe images functioning beyond the concerns of representation and spectatorship, which perform operations most consequentially in service of corporate and military interests. This can include security applications, industrial automation, data-driven governance, and automated warfare.
Massive infrastructures supporting the teleological and operationalized image have proliferated since the time of Farocki’s initial conceptualization, and the concept is useful today in describing the vast networks of algorithmically governed visual culture transacted via monopolized social media platforms trafficking in attentional, behavioral, and data-extractive economies. This choreography of operational media within platform capitalism, along with the internalization of the imperatives of attentional economies, shapes our visual culture to a critical extent. Much of the media encountered in increasingly hyperspecified algorithmic operations serves the function of commanding attention, producing commoditized data, generating clicks, realizing advertising revenue, and steering behavior. Images today look back at us, collect intimate information, and act insidiously on that information toward financialized ends.
Sophisticated behavioral industries, built with a scientific rigor almost entirely unmoored from ethical considerations, have contributed to a neurochemically calibrated form of dopaminergic media deployed to addict users. In some cases, particularly among vulnerable demographics such as children and teenagers, users become so chronically habituated to these technologies that they spend the majority of their free time subjugated to them. A consequential and compounding quantity of media today operates at the level of addiction and compulsion.
The exponential rise of data-powered operational media exhausts human-scale consideration, and an opportunistic market endeavors to capitalize on the datafication of the world through ever more energy-intensive infrastructural projects for the capture and processing of data. This creates a Jevons Paradox of compounding energy usage, wherein even technological gains in efficiency do little to stymie the energy expenditures produced by further adoption and intensified use. In the name of data rationalism, its questionable promises, and its primary function of capital accumulation, enormous, extractive, and ecologically ruinous infrastructures are being imposed on the public to our collective more-than-human detriment.
Through the abstracted logics of datafication, we are given quantified glimpses into an ecological polycrisis initiated by the same base economic structures and technologies of administration at work in the monopolization of the internet. It stands to reason that the driving forces of social and ecological devastation—limitless growth-based economies, carbonized energy infrastructures, animal agriculture, automobilism, and so on—are not suffering from a lack of data (or from the massive energy-intensive private data infrastructures required to datafy the world) in order to remediate them, rather from a lack of political and social will, as well as the redeployment and redistribution of rights and resources.
The Kardashian–Jenner conglomerate
The Kardashian–Jenner conglomerate offers a generative case study of an operational aesthetics built on a distinctly liberal, capitalist hypersubjectivity broadly enacted through social and traditional media to market goods primarily produced in industrial and plantation modes. The fetish of liberal subjectivity is superarticulated in their performative, pharmacological, and surgical construction of the fully commoditized and optimized self, and their branded subjectivity is leveraged into endless variations of products, promotions, and other forms of capitalization. The Kardashian–Jenner conglomerate maintains a highly integrated, multiplatform, cross-industry portfolio spanning beauty, cosmetics, fashion, fragrances, jewelry, accessories, food, beverages, health, wellness, media, technology, home, lifestyle, brand collaborations, and luxury partnerships—a Gesamtkunstwerk of neoliberal operational aesthetics.
CoComelon
CoComelon, the second most viewed YouTube channel in recent years—purchased by a Blackstone-funded “next generation media company” founded by former Disney executives for three billion dollars and now part of a vast conglomerate churning out dopaminergic children’s content—provides an instructive case study of profit-motivated operational media targeting children at the earliest stages of development. In this case, the primary operations at work are the capture of children’s attention to earn advertising revenue for host platforms, the securing of streaming deals, spin-offs, merchandise, licensing, or IP franchises, and the training of emerging generations of lifelong consumers. In Jia Tolentino’s 2024 reporting, we are given a snapshot of a capital-fueled children’s content mill garnering sixty billion minutes of YouTube streams in the first quarter of 2023, while lead writers earning barely livable five-figure salaries in Los Angeles are laid off during restructuring exercises. This provides yet another example of the trajectory of unregulated capital in its ruthless expropriation of labor and drive toward market domination—exploiting and automating its own means of production wherever possible while remaining fiduciarily bound to the expansion of children’s attention capture and potential profits.
It remains to be seen what regulatory measures, if any, will be implemented to safeguard children from content designed to capitalize on their biologically evolved dispositions through a hallucinatory sensorium of increasingly machine-generated nonsense. This logic of “optimized engagement” holds across nearly every feature of platform capitalism: from search to social media, and of course e-commerce. The result is an arms race for attention, while a staggering portion of the technologized world has developed acute addictions to dopaminergic media and attendant psychosocial maladies, increasingly acquiescing to the behavioral imperatives of the animating marketers. We might add technologically administered dopaminergic media to opium and sugar on the list of the most widely deployed and socially debilitating drugs distributed by multinational corporations.
The Vatican, Caleb Miller for Unsplash
Anna Church for Unspash
Operational media—media intended to produce particular outcomes in their audiences—is, of course, hardly unprecedented. In the Western tradition, the aesthetic regime of Christianity, with its architectures, crosses, paintings, icons, elaborate clothing, and rituals, accompanied and legitimized perhaps the most extensive imperial bid for global power in human history. The extraplanetary global infrastructure of the internet constitutes an epochal development at an unprecedented scale and the culmination of the so-called Western project in the United States marks the most powerful imperial empire to date.
It is instructive to examine the cultural methodologies of American imperialism during its twentieth-century bid for global hegemony. The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF)—a CIA-adjacent organization that at its height in the 1950s and 1960s operated in over thirty-five countries, founded or sponsored more than twenty journals, organized hundreds of conferences, and exerted influence over university departments, literary prizes, translation programs, arts councils, research institutes, and institutional collecting practices—became a primary instrument of liberal imperial soft power. It was among the most influential cultural apparatuses of its era, shaping global definitions of “freedom” through culture and ideas while promoting a liberal conception of individuality and a distrust of socialist forms of art and collective solidarity. Its strategies were complex and often involved the selective embrace of left or socialist positions in order to inoculate audiences and neutralize political power. The paradigm of the lone genius artist, disavowing collective politics and hyperfixated on identity, was bolstered through this coordinated international network and remains dominant today.
It is worth considering which legacies and continuations of these initiatives persist, whether analogous programs remain operative, what values and strategies they advance, and which foundations, institutions, and artists administer them.
In my ambivalent proximity to the art world, I have observed recurring motifs from the liberal project alongside emerging practices that raise questions about their ubiquity and reproduction along vectors of liberalization. These may be provisionally grouped into a schematic that resonates with the CCF program: hyperindividual, hypernormal, science-fictional, ornamentalist, obscurantist, and melodramatic.
Juliana Huxtable
The hyperindividual artist presentation foregrounds the extreme articulation of performative selfhood, often positioning the artist’s own identity as the artwork or producing highly idiosyncratic series that emphasize individual distinction. The American artist, writer, performer, DJ, and cofounder of the New York–based nightlife project Shock Value, Juliana Huxtable, offers one example among many.
The hypernormal, following Adam Curtis’s 2016 documentary HyperNormalisation, is characterized by the production of unrelenting misinformation, misdirection, co-option, distortion, and overwhelm. The result is a paralyzed, passive, consumer-oriented subject incapacitated by epistemic exhaustion. An e-flux text describing Trevor Paglen’s 2023 film Doty illustrates this condition:
Richard Doty is a former Air Force Intelligence operative whose job at Kirtland AFB in New Mexico involved creating and disseminating disinformation about the existence of extraterrestrial spacecraft to UFO researchers.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Kirtland AFB was home to a wide range of highly classified technology experiments involving lasers, stealth aircraft, and nuclear weapons. Strange phenomena in the skies above the base piqued the interest of amateur and professional UFO investigators. Doty’s job was to recruit UFO researchers to be informants to the Air Force about goings-on in the UFO community and to spread military disinformation about UFOs among their peers. To accomplish this, Doty supplied fake documents to UFO investigators purporting to tell the “truth” about government involvement with extraterrestrials.
On the other hand, Doty insists that UFOs are real, that the government is in possession of crashed spacecraft, and that he was read into a top-secret military program detailing the history and status of US-alien relations.
In this video, Doty discusses the craft of disinformation, and describes operations he ran against UFO researchers as well as elements of the “real” top-secret extraterrestrial technology program that he says continues to this day.
The film was presented as part of a tour he called "YOU'VE BEEN F*CKED BY PSYOPS: UFOS, MAGIC, MIND CONTROL, ELECTRONIC WARFARE, AND THE FUTURE OF MEDIA" The experience of encountering this work, like much of today’s hypermediated political spectacle, is one of profound confusion and apathy—an affective state that serves a political function in maintaining the status quo and creating a climate of confusion and paranoia.
A proliferation of science-fictional futurisms is institutionally supported across the liberal art world today—Afrofuturisms, Latinx Futurisms, Indigenous Futurisms, Arab and Gulf Futurisms, Sinofuturisms, Queer Futurisms, and others. While these movements are heterogeneous, common tendencies emerge: highly aestheticized, idiosyncratic, and performative representations of essentialized identities produced by professional artists within liberal institutions. These speculative scenarios rarely articulate concrete political demands or enduring institutions, raising questions about how the commodified spectacle of identity representation serves existing power relations as well as the artists who perform them.
Neon Wang for Unsplash
A frequently cited instance of CCF Cold War cultural politics is the celebration of abstract expressionism as a vehicle for depoliticizing art while fetishizing individual self-expression and still, of course, producing an unmistakable series of collectible works. This tendency persists today in the celebration of ornamental art co-emerging with the largest unregulated market in the world. Such works, traded globally, may appear politically anodyne, yet their politics might be better characterized as a form of financialized smoothness, for their ability to move through the circuits of the international art market. The mediagenic immersive installation optimized for social media reproduction can be understood as an outgrowth of these values.
Obscurantism, as used here, refers to the deliberate rendering of historically significant subjects as inaccessible through excessive abstraction, obfuscation, or academic artspeak. This mode is widely recognized across liberal art institutions, where opacity often substitutes for substance.
Melodrama has become one of the dominant narrative forms of late-capitalist culture, not simply as a genre but as a social technology that translates structural contradictions into private emotional crises. In melodramatic storytelling, whether in soap operas, prestige television, or award-winning literary fiction, social conflict is consistently reframed as betrayal, infidelity, moral failure, or psychological damage. Collective institutions appear either absent or corrupt; solidarity is fragile and naïve; and trust is often punished. Structural forces such as economic precarity, class antagonism, or political disempowerment are displaced onto intimate relationships, where they are experienced as tragic inevitabilities rather than as problems open to collective action. This narrative logic produces what Mark Fisher described as a form of capitalist realism: a cultural atmosphere in which social breakdown is endlessly represented yet never politicized, generating a hedonic familiarity and romanticization with fracture that forecloses alternative imaginaries. Social cohesion becomes ever more remote through overexposure to stories in which cohesion is repeatedly shown to be impossible.
Prize culture and elite literary institutions reinforce this dynamic by systematically rewarding narratives that aestheticize rupture, transgression, and psychic damage while treating collective projects as suspect, authoritarian, or artistically naïve. As Frances Stonor Saunders documents in The Cultural Cold War (2000), liberal cultural institutions during the Cold War did not primarily promote positive visions of collective liberal society; rather, they elevated forms of art and writing that foregrounded alienation, ambiguity, and individual moral struggle, thereby positioning collectivism itself as culturally regressive or dangerous. This logic persists in contemporary cultural economies, where awards function as mechanisms of canon formation that legitimate a narrow range of affects and narrative structures. The result is not just the celebration of “dark” or “complex” art, but the normalization of social atomization as depth, mistrust as realism, and betrayal as the basic grammar of human relations. In this sense, melodrama and prize culture operate together as instruments of affective counter-collectivism: rendering collective values implausible within the dominant cultural imagination.
It serves us to more closely examine how operational media—co-emergent with neoliberalism, financialization, platform capitalism, and American imperialism—shapes prevailing conceptions of art and visual culture. By understanding the forces and inertias through which these ideas have come to ubiquity, we are better equipped to look outside and beyond them in the creation of the otherwise.
Otherwise is a series on neoliberal contemporary art and its unbounded remainders by Perry Shimon.
Otherwise Part V: Landscape Aesthetics and the Liberal Commons
Installation view of the exhibition Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst–Starmirror at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2025
text by Arlo Kremen
Born in Johnson City, Tennessee, and Birmingham, England, respectively, artist duo Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst are two of the art world’s most outspoken figures for AI integration. Having attended Stanford while still being partly based in the Bay Area, Herndon’s continued application of AI models in her musical compositions and artwork remains unsurprising, as is her angle on this burgeoning technology. Partnering with Dryhurst, who has a history of advocating for internet decentralization and involvement in blockchain tech (think NFTs and social tokens), they have advanced discussions of AI through their music releases and installations since 2015. The KW Institute for Contemporary Art is the home for their current show, Starmirror.
Inspired by the much-admired Benedictine abbess and polymath from the Rhineland, Hildegard von Bingen, the show trains its attention on synchronicities between AI and the abbess’s own vision of divine order, all while considering the new role of authorship, whose precarity has undergone much turmoil in current AI-related discourse. Starmirror ultimately vies to reconceptualize human-AI collaboration and production, imagining beneficial and innovative relationships between two entities that many find existentially at odds.
Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst with sub
Arboretum, 2025
SLA resin, PETG filament, steel nuts, bolts, and pine wood
Commissioned and produced by KW Institute for ContemporaryArt, Berlin and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf
The first room hosts Arboretum (2025), a sculptural work entirely concerned with Public Diffusion, an image model reared on publicly owned and Creative Commons Zero images, shaping a foundation model solely on ethically sourced images. Arboretum’s model uses no privately owned or sourced images in its training, a feature of nearly all AI image models. Its dataset is free to access, forming a democratized model without specific ownership.
The artists built PD40M, the largest public-domain dataset to date. Compiled from 40 million, it continues to grow through participation. The Starmirror app prompts viewers to add to the commonwealth of images already accessible to the public in an effort to resist the common perception that AI image models force viewers into a passive position. ‘Slop’ is the thrown-around term used to define the visual excrement of internet aesthetics that AI is famed for producing. Here, AI is posited as capable of producing something greater than lowest-common-denominator symbols. Instead of being the receiver of information, the human becomes the feeder, using AI to decode and visualize patterns within shared human activity. This model necessitates escaping the algorithm, going outside, and searching. If anyone remembers the screen zombies of the summer of 2016, the Starmirror app is a lot like Pokémon GO, except it is about seeing the world, not collecting clout in a digital landscape. It is AI between technology and the world.
It’s a challenge to see the good in AI. Coming from a political background far outside the tech bubble, conversations around AI and pattern recognition are primarily centered on ICE’s collaboration with Palantir. That, regardless of intention and dedication to constructing a public-supporting commons, this technology will be appropriated and abused by government agencies and private businesses. Data will be bought, sold, and used to incriminate the most vulnerable. Perhaps this is naive, that all this is claimed without key information and the knowledge to differentiate models, and that fear-mongering over AI is possibly dangerous for other reasons. All of this might be true; none of it might be. But, regardless of how one might feel about such hesitations or the positive excitement provoked by the idea of such a work, the images produced by Starmirror, as one might expect, are layers upon layers of endless pastiche. So why is this at the KW institute? Starmirror is not about art. It is not about the capacity and ability of the image but about making sense of a database. This is where Hildegard von Bingen enters.
At the heart of Arboretum is a layered model inspired by Bingen’s 1151 play Ordo Virtutum. Using neumes (symbols from early Western musical notation) as a base layer, with an overlay of AI scrawlings generated by a model from Algomus, a team of researchers specializing in music modeling, analysis, and creation with AI. Here, the model composes a polyphony to create infinite variations of Ordo Virtutum that seek to pay her tribute by extending her legacy. Of course, the infinite iteration of her work neither pays her tribute nor extends her legacy. Such an approach to the authorship of a woman who died nearly 900 years ago is bizarre, to say the least. The product feels more like a mockery and bastardization than respect. For a play concerning the salvation of the human soul, protecting the soul from the devil who taunts it with worldly pleasures, the construction of a robot Hildegard von Bingen, in a removal of her holy dedication and soul, does nothing other than turn her work into a representation of those very earthly desires with which the devil taunts. The artists appear to care little about the actual work of Hildegard von Bingen, but about how AI can change it, add to it, and what AI can do when her highly interpretable and semi-illegible notation system enters a database.
Installation view of the exhibition Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst–Starmirror at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2025
In the main hall, The Ladder (2025) continues the duo’s fascination with the German abbess, who envisioned ladders as hierarchies containing tiers with angels and virtues bridging Earth and the divine. In a convenient synchronicity, computer scientist and psychologist Geoffrey Hinton described machine learning systems’ latent space diagrams, which are based on the stacking of neural networks, from a more foundational bottom to an increasingly complex top, as “ladders of abstraction,” affirming the ladder as a dual referent. In the space around The Ladder, different sounds encroach, charging the hall with the divine. Some works are from The Call (2024–25), a research and development project and exhibition by Herndon, Dryhurst, and Serpentine Arts Technologies; others are from surviving medieval works, some by Hildegard von Bingen herself, but intermixed are AI interpretations of Hildegard’s work. In conjunction with the show, the artists invite the Starmirror ensemble, volunteers, and choirs to visit and contribute their voices in call-and-response sessions to train an AI choir that is scheduled to debut in the summer of 2026 at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf.
Starmirror, perhaps more than an art exhibition, is a continuation of their experiment. The “art” of the shows is often secondary to figuring out how to coexist with, if not utilize, AI to serve people, not corporations—a highly respectable mission. But to take away a future in which AI might aid human creativity and art-making, at this moment, feels foolish. The show does not demonstrate the same level of care for the image or score as it does for the systems that produce them. So often, the show stressed the collaborative nature of their AI use. All of these folks come and share time, space, and their very bodies with each other and the AI choir they are building. The question that looms over the show: how is training an AI choir any more communal than the traditional choir? What is the difference in the aggregation of voices and beings other than the displacement and invisibility of the body?
Starmirror is on view through January 18, 2026 @ KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.
Ian Davis, Waiters, 2025. Courtesy of the Artist and Nicodim.
Connoisseurs of world order fill Ian Davis’s canvases, their picturesque and surreal stomping grounds an ode to both beauty and horror. The eeriness of his hyper-structured displays is overlaid by a rhythmic attitude and hip-hop influence. Davis’s landscapes keep a certain distance from the scenes they portray—the viewer is implicated at altitude, surveying a scene as you might an out-of-body experience. The entrapments of the modern day—wealth, power, surveillance—are articulated by a contemporary rendition of art history’s revered flâneurs. Starting with a blank canvas and a commitment to an idea, Davis’s process is completely inseparable from his final product, which are both uniquely his own. Read more.
Jingyi Li. The Hidden Drawer-Tea Spoon, 2024. 16x26x2.5cm, Bobbin Lace, antique tea spoon case.
At the center of feminist practice, soft-spoken materials, and Asian heritage, Jingyi Li is defining contemporary artistry through storytelling. Drawing on her PhD in anthropology, she weaves research, memory, and cultural narrative into delicate, hand-crafted lace and other tactile materials, transforming everyday objects into installations that explore emotion, identity, and history. From intimate cutlery sets in The Hidden Drawer to larger immersive works like The Oyster Pail, Li’s work unlocks the expressive potential of unconventional materials, creating spaces where Asian women’s stories are told. Read more.
Dawn Williams Boyd
Abduction, 2025
Assorted fabrics and cotton embroidery floss
45 x 67.5 inches
In FEAR at Fort Gansevoort, Dawn Williams Boyd inverts American history, imagining a parallel universe where Black oppressors imported white slaves and have maintained an economy predicated on race-based exploitation for centuries. Her cloth paintings, made with textiles imported from Africa, all closely resemble canonical American ephemera, including historical photographs and advertisements. Maintaining this color-inverting framework, the gallery, for its third solo exhibition with Boyd, has painted its typically white walls black.
The exhibition quickly succeeds in making us hyperaware of our racial biases. The scenes depicted—enslaved people chained together on ships, hooded horsemen celebrating lynchings, peaceful protestors attacked by police and civilians—are so ingrained in our memories that we instinctively assign roles before noticing Boyd has reversed them. Even knowing the artist’s intent, standing before these explicit works, our minds still resist the uncanny world she constructs.
Dawn Williams Boyd
Brainwashed, 2025
Assorted fabrics and cotton embroidery floss
66 x 43.5 inches
In addition to these violent scenes, Boyd highlights the psychological violence that racism perpetuates in relation to the commercialization of cultural tropes. In a piece titled Brainwashed, a young Black girl, holding a black bar of soap, asks a white slave, “Why doesn’t your mamma wash you with Fairy Soap?” We are directly confronted with the immediate qualities we assign to the colors black and white, as well as how these perceptions affect one’s feelings of self-worth, particularly when learned at a young age.
Dawn Williams Boyd
Cultural Appropriation, 2025
Assorted fabrics and cotton embroidery floss
47 x 58 inches
More than 150 years after the de jure end of slavery in America, economic and social inequalities persist. In keeping with this reality, Boyd’s textile works generally proceed chronologically through history, but they offer no hint of progress toward integration or equality; the racial divide remains unambiguous. She further underscores the role of seemingly benevolent industries, like entertainment and medicine, in perpetuating racial inequality. We see white subjects forced into society’s most exploited roles, from dancing in banana skirts in service of the hegemonic class (at a Prohibition era nightclub in Harlem), to being the subjects of gruesome gynecological research (imitating the work of Marion Sims, the “father of gynecology” who performed studies on enslaved Black women). In the real world, Black patients disproportionately lack access to the advances their exploitation made possible.
Dawn Williams Boyd
The Lost Cause Mythos, 2025
Assorted fabrics and cotton embroidery floss
56 x 70.5 inches
In The Lost Cause Mythos, a reframed Gone With the Wind features a white mammy serving a Black Scarlett O’Hara. Boyd addresses the power of art in shaping and reinforcing societal myths, however, she refuses to entertain the “happy slave” stereotype, instead portraying a despondent attendant. White characters lose their individuality; in settings from the beginning of the slave trade to the present day, men and women sport identical short blond hair and appear either nearly nude or in plain white garments. This homogenization dehumanizes them, treating them as props devoid of personality. Their Black counterparts, by contrast, have diverse hairstyles and elaborate clothing in a variety of colors, with red—here a symbol of power—especially prevalent.
Today, the US federal government and many state governments are attacking DEI initiatives, legal protections secured by the Civil Rights movement, and the honest teaching of American history, denigrating attempts to right historical wrongs as “reverse racism.” Boyd’s stark work puts these unsubstantiated claims into perspective. It asserts the degree to which most Americans underestimate the ongoing legacy of systemic racism and emphasizes the role of emotion in our material world. We see fear in the eyes of everyone, from those experiencing the horrors below deck on slave ships to a fragile ruling class who feels existentially entitled to their privilege and is terrified of losing it.
Dawn Williams Boyd: FEAR is on view through January 24 at Fort Gansevoort, 5 Ninth Avenue, New York
timo fahler, SKYBEARER, 2025, Steel, stained glass, lead, found object, 62" H x 42" W x 4" D
timo fahler’s TERMINAL CLASSIC is a series of eight sculptural wall works that combine images from ancient Maya culture with symbols of America power, meditating on memory, the weight of ancestry, personal upheaval and collective uncertainty. Its title refers to the period between 250-900 CE, when many of the great Maya city-states in the southern lowlands experienced a socio-political collapse and abandonment that is often referred to as the Maya Collapse. Created while the artist was moving from Los Angeles to Amsterdam, these works mark a major life change as his family expanded and emigrated.
fahler’s “SKYBEARER” in stained glass is set behind rusting window bars. This is one of the four deities responsible for holding up the sky, separating it from Earth, and making mortal life possible. His incarceration might explain what has gone so terribly wrong with the cosmic order.
In “IDYLLIC, IDEALIC, IDEA LICK, I’D EEL LICK, I DEAL ICK,” the White House is presented “like a stage prop or an empty shell, holding only the idea of something.” It serves as a potent symbol of the crumbling face of American capitalism, particularly in juxtaposition with “FLAG,” which is seen directly ahead when you enter the gallery. This buckling discarded bedspring that sat in the artist’s studio for months revealed itself as an American flag when fahler discovered that it was composed of thirteen rows. It was the very last piece he created before leaving Los Angeles.
timo fahler, flag, 2025, Steel, stained glass, lead, found object, 73" H x 50" w x 8" D
Because fahler is of mixed heritage, his work often touches on what it feels like to be caught between his Mexican and American cultures. This inner conflict is further articulated by the delicate friction between fragile, colorful glass held by rough, industrial materials, like rusted steel fences, metal bed springs, and rebar. This skillful balance of strength and fragility gives the work an almost animist sense of emotional stability.
When the light hits the stained glass, it casts vivid, colorful shadows on the wall, creating an ethereal extension to the work that is constantly transforming as the day passes. In effect, these shadows act as a performative counterpart to works that are initially perceived as purely visual. Within the changing environment, the integrity of the work and the narrative it portrays persist.
TERMINAL CLASSIC is on view through December 13 @ Sebastian Gladstone Gallery 36 White Street, New York
text by Arlo Kremen
Standing a block away from the last stop of the U3 at Krumme Lanke, Haus am Waldsee, a beautiful residence turned art museum, sits by the Zehlendorf quarter’s local lake, or Waldsee. Haus am Waldsee is the only property on the lake where all visitors are free to access the water, a facet of the institution deeply in line with the ethos of the late Beverly Buchanan’s work. For her “shack” works, Buchanan regularly trespassed onto the grounds of these structures of Southern American vernacular architecture for photos and inspiration, coming face to face with many upset, disgruntled, and irritated homeowners, but also new friends. In this regular practice, she met Ms. Mary Lou Fulcron, a woman who had built her house and lived alone. In an excerpt of the artist’s writing, Buchanan shares how she helped carry logs for Ms. Fulcron, and her challenge of ingratiating herself with an isolated black woman in Georgia, a challenge that had become a regular exercise for the artist. From her brief diary entry pinned up in the show, Ms. Fulcron meant a lot to Buchanan. A woman of endurance, who, when hospitalized, escaped back to her house on foot, ten miles away, scared something would happen to her home.
These are the stories Buchanan saw in every shack she came across, with many of these structures being somewhat-restyled slave cabins. She saw power, endurance, and survival in each and every one. When speaking to curators, Beatrice Hilke and Pia-Marie Remmers told another story of Buchanan entering a home at night without a roof. All she wrote about was how clear the stars were. She never came to a home with judgment, critique, or patronizing worry; she came to these homes as if they were art objects—monuments to those who live and have lived in them.
Beverly Buchanan
Three Families (A Memorial Piece with Scars) [with legend], 1989
Print on paper
10 x 23 cm
Courtesy of the Estate of Beverly Buchanan and Andrew Edlin Gallery
Ima-Abasi Okon made two accompanying works to the show. The first involved lockboxes outside the premises that take visitors to the lake and onto the private property around the museum. In these lockboxes are lube and organic materials. Lube is a substance to bring an object into a space where it does not belong. With its sexual connotations, the interaction between foreign object and intruded upon space can be procreative and pleasurable, referring to Buchanan’s trespassings and their paramount role in her practice. The other works Okon made were wall paintings covering every inch of wall with pollen. Titled Sex (2025), the walls are streaked yellow, bringing the materiality and smell of the outside inside. Here, Okon submits the walls to environmental degradation, a frequent technique of her more labor-intensive sculptural works. With a title like Sex, Okon also propounds this feature of her work as similarly pleasurable and procreative.
A common misconception of Buchanan’s oeuvre is that she is an outsider artist. However, the artist had been exhibited at A.I.R. gallery alongside contemporary and friend Ana Mendieta and started out as an abstract expressionist under the tutelage of Norman Lewis. Buchanan was trained as an insider. Her works are of the trends of her time, land art, conceptual art, and post-minimalism, but her works have a D.I.Y. inflection to them. Her shacks, alongside her other wooden construction pieces, are undeniably in conversation with the folk art of the South. According to Buchanan, she always “made things,” never really understanding her creations as art objects until later. She began her professional life in medicine, studying parasitology at Columbia University, which brought her to New York, where she eventually connected with the Art Students’ League.
Beverly Buchanan,
Lamar County, GA, 2003
Oil pastel on paper
56 x 76 cm
courtesy of the Estate of Beverly Buchanan and Andrew Edlin Gallery
The artist suffered from several chronic illnesses, having stacks of medical bills to pay at any given time. To pay these bills, Buchanan sold many of her works for the exact prices of different bills, spreading her work across a plethora of private owners in and outside of Macon and Athens, Georgia. Hilke and Remmers, doing research in the state to prepare for this show, ventured into many homes only to find different Buchanan works on unassuming walls and tables. All of her flower works exhibited in the show came from these homes. The flowers were put together by Okon, offering a contrasting side to the artist, who, in adjoining rooms, has her still sculptural works. One such room includes her monumental frustula, cement sculptures whose molds she made from bricks and found materials like milk cartons. The frustula works, while many being of different cement mixtures, all have a timeless, enduring quality—shaped by time. The flowers, on the other hand, are electric. Quick, loose-colored scrawlings across paper build up a shape that could be called anything but still lives. Her shack pastels have an identical effect. Often exhibited with the shack sculptures, the curators made the decision to show the pastels on the second floor, overlooking the sculpture garden. By separating pastels from sculptures, both mediums could stand autonomously, the curators prevent the unfortunate hierarchy that tends to favor the shack sculptures as the more prominent representations.
Beverly Buchanan
Untitled, 1978—1980
Print on glossy paper
20 x 25 cm
Courtesy of the Estate of Beverly Buchanan and Andrew Edlin Gallery
Beverly Buchanan. Weathering took a very gentle, nuanced approach to the wide-ranging work of Beverly Buchanan, permitting her work to breathe and soak up the space as individual works and as series, while simultaneously forwarding the artist’s massive archive. Buchanan had a rigorous documentation process—photos, writings, poems, and drawings—spread by the stairwell on the second floor, situating her ephemera as a prime feature of her practice. Her archiving instinct became of sizable importance to her Marsh Ruins (1981). For this land piece on the coast of Georgia, Buchanan built a memorial to the enslaved people who, once landed on American soil, raced to the water and drowned as an act of return to their homes. Funded by the Guggenheim grant, Buchanan worked with a few other laborers to make tabby stones that blend into the swamp landscape, becoming nearly unrecognizable as human-made objects. Shown as a slideshow, the recording covers the correspondence between the artist and the Guggenheim, the work proceeds through the day-by-day photographic coverage with supplementary captions taken by the artist to prove the project was completed. Although not necessarily Marsh Ruins, the work shown is an artwork in its own right, turning bureaucratic processes into a creative act. Beverly Buchanan. Weathering showcases a nuanced approach to Buchanan’s work, all while giving visitors a glimpse into her mind to reveal a singular person who stretched her art into every corner of her life.
Beverly Buchanan. Weathering is on view through February 1st @ Haus am Waldsee, Berlin.
Tseng Kwong Chi
Keith Haring in New York City Subway Car, 1981/2019
Gelatin silver print
20 × 30 inches
Downtown/Uptown New York in the Eighties reveals a decade shaped by cultural pressure points – economic insecurity, constitutional backlash, a public health catastrophe, and the debate over who gets to be seen, feeling uncannily familiar in today’s world. The show frames the decade as a blueprint for understanding the problems artists face today, battling with institutions, identity, and the power of image in everyday life.
After the financial crisis of the 1970s, New York entered a decade marked by raw, unpredictable talent, with artists who were defiantly bent on redefining what art could be. Rising artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sherrie Levine, and Christopher Wool began reshaping contemporary art, challenging expectations, and expanding the bounds of artistic expression. The ’80s ushered in a new era, in which experimentation and radical expression were the gravitational center of the scene.
Entire neighborhoods downtown were still gritty, industrial, and half-abandoned, which allowed artists to claim lofts and storefronts as studios, galleries, and performance spaces. The lack of structure made the city fertile ground for artists to experiment, and community was paramount in bringing ideas together. From the economic crisis recovery to the rise of AIDS, art became a way to claim space, identity, and voice often in ways that were provocative and deeply personal to the artist.
Barbara Kruger
Untitled (What me worry?), 1987
Photographic silkscreen on vinyl
107 7⁄8 × 127 15⁄16 inches
One of the defining threads was a turn toward confrontational, socially charged art. Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (What Me Worry?) exemplifies this impulse. Using her signature combination of bold, declarative text layered over ironic phrases and imagery, Kruger exposes the gap between the carefree façade promoted by mass culture and the complicated reality underneath.
The phrase “What me worry?” places the viewer inside that first-person statement, while challenging them to question the role that privilege plays in determining the content and degree of our worries. In doing so, the work pushes the viewer to step outside the passive acceptance of cultural norms and to recognize how language and imagery shape our emotional responses.
Guerrilla Girls
How Many Women Had One-Person Exhibitions at NYC Museums Last Year?, 1985
Off-set print on paper
Sheet: 17 × 22 inches
On the recurring theme of confrontational art, Guerrilla Girls calls out discrimination in the art world. These bold posters were designed to draw viewers’ attention to the main issue for women in the art industry: the lack of representation in major institutions and solo exhibitions within a global art capital. True to their approach, the Guerrilla Girls maintain anonymity using gorilla masks as a way to shift the attention from the individual to the collective message.
Works such as untitled(fred) by Kenny Scharf, embody the decade’s chaotic energy with the use of clashing patterns, complementary colors, and cartoonish, improvised expressions.
Guerrilla Girls
The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist, 1988
Print on paper
Sheet: 17 × 22 inches
In Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Gravestone, the three-door installation represents the architecture of a monument to life, death, and what lies beyond. Created just a year before his death, the rigid doors form passages to Basquiat’s life and memories. His untitled (Mary Boone) features a rough painting of a crown, with “mary boone” written underneath. A fitting inclusion for the curator, as she marks her triumphant return to the New York art world.
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Gravestone, 1987
Acrylic and oil on wooden panels
5415⁄16 × 687⁄8 × 221⁄16 inches
Keith Haring, along with artists such as González-Torres, David Wojnarowicz, and Niki de Saint Phalle confronted society with its role in the AIDS epidemic. On a formal level, Haring experimented with diverse surfaces such as ceramic vases and chalkboards, adapting his signature dancing figures to new textures while preserving the joyful energy of his line work. Jeff Koons, by contrast, embraced materials like stainless steel, transforming everyday objects into highly-polished, hyper-reflective icons of consumer culture. Together, these artists pushed material boundaries using unexpected textures to reimagine the relationship between art, objects, and cultural norms.
Keith Haring
Untitled (Gold Vase), 1981
Felt-tip pen and enamel on fiberglass vase
40 × 25 × 25 inches
Downtown/Uptown New York in the Eighties is on view through December 13 at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, 19 East 64th Street, New York
Salone del Mobile.Milano’s new three-year partnership with Art Basel feels like a turning point for both the design world and the art market. With its debut during the VIP preview of Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, Salone introduced a quietly luxurious Collectors Lounge designed by Lissoni & Partners and filled with pieces from many of Italy’s most respected makers—names like Poltrona Frau, Molteni&C, Foscarini, Arper, and others. The intention is clear: Italian design isn’t content to orbit the art world anymore. It wants a seat at the center of the conversation.
For decades, Salone has been rooted in Milan, anchoring what is essentially the world’s most important design week. It has always been a destination for architects, buyers, and the broader design community. But the landscape has shifted. Collectors now think about furniture and lighting the way they think about art—objects that reflect taste, identity, and, increasingly, long-term value. At the same time, the art market itself has expanded into territory once reserved for architecture and design. By stepping into Art Basel’s ecosystem, Salone is acknowledging this blurred terrain and aiming to shape it rather than react to it.
Maria Porro, the president of Salone del Mobile.Milano, described the partnership as both timely and strategic. “Our role, today more than ever, is to anticipate the changes shaping the international market and to create the conditions for Italian companies to engage with new worlds, where art, design and cultural investments all come together,” she said. She makes the case that this isn’t simply about visibility but about placing design where it belongs. “Bringing Italian design into the heart of its Collectors Lounges means not only amplifying the international visibility of our companies, but enhancing the culture of design as a competitive asset.”
The Lounge in Miami is less a showroom than a carefully staged environment—soft lighting, sculptural seating, and that particular sense of calm that Italian design does so well. For the companies involved, it’s an opportunity to be in front of an audience that matters: collectors, museum patrons, developers, and cultural players who influence how taste moves globally. For those visiting, it reframes design pieces not as decorative afterthoughts but as part of the cultural landscape Art Basel has spent decades cultivating.
What’s clear is that this move is about more than one fair. By embedding itself in the Basel circuit, including the Hong Kong edition, Salone is positioning Italian design as something closer to cultural currency—objects that sit comfortably alongside contemporary art and share its language of prestige and intention.
There are challenges in crossing over so boldly, of course. The art world can be demanding; design risks becoming overly polished or drifting too far from its roots in craft and utility. Still, under Porro’s leadership, the direction feels deliberate. She has emphasized that the goal isn’t simply to place furniture in a room but to bring the “culture of design” into dialogue with a global audience.
If the partnership succeeds, it could reshape how design is collected, discussed, and valued—and, in the process, give Italian craftsmanship an even bigger role in shaping the spaces where culture is experienced today.
André Masson
Massaker “Massacre,” 1931
Oil on canvas
120 x 160 cm
Courtesy of Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch
Tucked behind the cafe and gift shop of the Neue Nationalgalerie sits a modest L-shaped gallery space. Enough room to fit a medium-sized show, one would not expect it to be used to host the Surrealists’ international cohort, who could very well fill the entire museum with their verbose oeuvre. As such, Max Ernst to Dorothea Tanning: Networks of Surrealism has a specific aim, a narrowing agent succinct enough as to make the gallery space feel appropriately expansive to cover the community of artists with twenty-six works. The show homes in on provenance, tracking each displayed painting sourced from the Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch Collection.
In 2023, around 100 artworks from the Pietzsch Collection received careful attention from researchers seeking to uncover each work’s origin and the succession of owners. The goal was to ascertain whether Nazi persecution played a factor in the shifting of ownership. During the Nazi occupation in France, the Surrealists and their interlocutors had to make a decision: flee into exile, remain as a part of the resistance, or go into hiding. This collection began in the 1970s and ended in the 2000s, acquiring works from galleries, dealers, and auction houses globally. The couple’s 2010 donation to the State of Berlin made this show and its research possible.
The show maps the provenance timeline of each displayed work, bringing historical narratives into the foreground. Biographical exhibitions can be a challenge. In a slightly different educational gesture than the anti-intellectualism plaguing museum plaques, where artists’ personal details take priority over the work itself, the work of art here still takes a secondary position to information. Art represents a story and thus loses its autonomy. The work is no longer important because it is art; the work is important for the history it represents. This approach attempts to give the gallery-goer a painless point of entry into art and meaning-making at large, but it never fails to come across as patronizing and distrustful of the audience’s intellect, assigning identity and history as prime tools for interpretation rather than the age-old skill of looking.
Many works benefited from the exhibition’s pursuit of historical narrative, unveiling colorful details of the Circle’s interpersonal affairs. The first painting of the show, Miró’s “The Arrow Piercing Smoke,” had originally been owned by the man it was dedicated to, Serge Lifar. The Ukrainian-French dancer and choreographer was a member of the notorious “Ballets Russes” and had worked closely with Max Ernst in costume and stage design. Appointed a year before and holding on to his directorship of the Ballet wing of the Paris Opera during Nazi Occupation, he was removed briefly for Nazi collaboration once the German occupying force retreated from France. “The Arrow Piercing Smoke” was held by Lifar for about thirty-six years before the painting’s acquisition by Paul Pétridès, where, at some point in the mid-1960s, it made the same leap across the Atlantic that Miró made to New York City nearly twenty years prior, eventually settling into the home of Alexander and Louisa Calder. While not necessarily about the art, the information supplementing the work poses it more as an object used to better understand the inner workings, members, associates, and the political landscape of the Surrealist diaspora.
Joan Miró
The Arrow Piercing Smoke, 1926
Oil on canvas
40 x 56 cm
Courtesy of Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch
The show has quite a few Ernst paintings given its relatively small size. And this is by no means a critique—he was not only one of the most central figures of the movement but also was interned at Les Milles, the concentration camp that would inspire his escape to the US with Peggy Guggenheim during his second arrest. His life is tinged with the effects of Nazi occupation, the driving narratological force of the show, but this fact led to a reliance on indirect ties to Nazism on the part of his displayed work. Kurt Siegelmann had many works alongside Ernst at the Exposition internationale du Surréalisme. He also held on to Ernst’s Garden Airplane Trap. Due to Siegelmann’s Judaism, he brought the painting with him to the US to avoid Nazi persecution. Another exhibited Ernst painting belonged to a different Jewish artist, Tristan Tzara, to whom Ernst gifted his painting Two Nude Girls, which remained in Tzara’s possession until his death in 1963, following his move to Marseille and his involvement in the French Resistance. Another displayed Ernst painting, Gala, Max and Paul, is a far cry from Garden Airplane Trap and Two Nude Girls, whose provenance is inseparable from Nazi persecution. Gala, Max, and Paul tells the story of Ernst’s ménage à trois with Paul and Gala Éluard. Despite being wonderfully scandalous biographical details, its inclusion in this show feels askew. A dramatic tone shift towards the playful fits poorly among so many artistic artifacts whose histories speak to evading Nazi destruction. Such an inclusion possibly hints, if read ungenerously, as wall filler or, more likely, an incomplete concept.
To exhibit a show where wall texts are more important than the paintings themselves is undoubtedly bizarre, a strangeness that permeated the gallery. Walking through the show, it felt out of place in an art museum like the Neue Nationalgalerie—possibly resonating more with a public archive or history museum than with an art institution. To study color and form felt antithetical to the curators’ mission, and yet, the format of an art show prevents combing through extensive texts, as the form necessitates the primacy of artworks. Networks of Surrealism was between an art exhibition and a historical exhibition, and in an attempt to straddle both, was left with two feet in the air.
Max Ernst to Dorothea Tanning: Networks of Surrealism is on view through March 1 @ Neue Nationalgalerie, Potsdamer Straße 50, Berlin
Photo by Charlotte Ercoli
Maya Man is a New York-based digital artist whose work probes the changing landscape of identity, femininity, and authenticity in online and offline culture. Through websites, code, and generative AI projects, she explores how we perform ourselves in digital environments.
One of her signature projects is Glance Back, a browser extension that randomly takes a photo of users on their computers every day. Created in 2018, the project archives what Man calls “the moments shared between you and your computer,” turning the quotidian encounters with our devices into a digital diary. She is also the creator of FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT, a coffee-table book that compiles her generative artworks styled after the glossy and aesthetically pleasing graphics commonly found on Instagram.
Central to her practice are questions of authenticity and performance: what does it mean to perform and post on the internet today? Is performance inherently corrosive or just another facet of human expression? For Man, she tackles these questions with thoughtful nuance.
Her latest project, StarQuest, is a solo-exhibition currently on view at Feral File. Drawing on her own childhood as a competitive dancer, Man uses generative AI to restage the choreography and interpersonal dramas of the cult reality series Dance Moms. Read More.
Sahara Longe: Deceit, 2025 | Green and purple nude, 2025
interview by Lola Titilayo
photography by Adedamola
Sitting at the intersection of art, culture and fashion, Oyinkansola Dada is a multidimensional creative force. Trained as a lawyer but driven by a deep commitment to storytelling and cultural awareness, she has become one of the most dynamic connectors of artists across the African diaspora. As the founder of Dada Gallery, DADA Magazine, and the style-driven cultural phenomenon Lagos Is Burning, she has built a community that uplifts emerging voices while redefining how contemporary African creativity is seen and celebrated. With the recent opening of her first permanent gallery space in Lagos, Dada continues to shape the continent’s cultural landscape; promoting authenticity and creating spaces where African art and identity can thrive globally. Read more. more.
Tehching Hsieh
One-Year Performance 1978-1979 (Cage Piece)
Photo: Cheng Wei Kuong
text by Hank Manning
After driving past horse farms on the way to Beacon, a suburb an hour north of New York City, I entered the Dia to join a sea of guests from around the world. We had come to see the oeuvre of Tehching Hsieh, a performance artist who completed six durational pieces between 1978 and 1999 and has since declared himself no longer an artist. However, the exhibition, which he helped design for its two-year run that began in October, is as much a work of art in its entirety as any of its particulars on display.
For his first one-year performance, Hsieh lived in a small cell in his studio, furnished with a bed and sink, pledging to abstain from speaking, reading, and writing entirely. A friend helped him daily by supplying food and cleaning his waste, as well as taking a daily portrait photograph; all 365 now hang in chronological order. We also see the cell that was Hsieh’s home, still furnished with the material goods he had: paper towels, toothpaste, a glass, mattress, gray blanket, bucket, and a change of clothes labeled with his name.
Installation view. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York
Next, in Time Clock Piece, Hsieh took even more photos—one every hour, on the hour, again for an entire year. The next exhibition space takes the form of a square with the same proportions as the first. These self-portraits are also hung in chronological order, underneath punch cards he stamped for each. Posed next to a clock, they serve as evidence that he rarely slept more than fifty minutes at a time, although Hsieh does list the occasional instances when he failed to clock in due to sleeping through his alarm.
Seemingly tired of spending too much time in his studio, Hsieh proceeded to the opposite extreme—he attempted to spend an entire year outdoors. Daily maps document his walks around lower Manhattan. He also penned the times and locations he ate, defecated, and slept. (To my surprise, he seems to have returned to typical eight-hour nights.) To survive the harsher environment, he had heavier clothes than his prior prison-like attire and carried a few new items, including an “I ❤︎ NY” plastic shopping bag, a radio, and a Swiss Army knife, all now on display. Again, Hsieh gives full disclosure: police detained him for fifteen hours—unfortunately indoors—after getting into a street fight.
Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano
Art / Life: One Year Performance 1983–1984 (Rope Piece)
Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano
Art / Life: One Year Performance 1983–1984 (Rope Piece)
Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano
Art / Life: One Year Performance 1983–1984 (Rope Piece)
Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano
Art / Life: One Year Performance 1983–1984 (Rope Piece)
Hsieh’s fourth year-long performance was his most collaborative—he spent the entire year attached by an eight-foot rope to fellow artist Linda Montano. The two, staying close together but avoiding touch, were not a couple and had not met prior. Their daily photos show mundane activities—sleeping, cooking, typing. A few days are labeled “Fight.”
The next two rooms take up an equal amount of space in the museum as the previous four. For his final year-long performance, Hsieh declared that he would neither make, look at, read, nor discuss art. Then, for thirteen years straight, he would make art but not publicly reveal it. At the end of this final performance, he released only one piece, which looks like a ransom note reading: “I kept myself alive.” Whatever else he did to occupy his time, the exhibition provides no hints: the two rooms are nearly entirely unadorned. Walking through these open rooms after looking so carefully at each day’s record in the previous four inspires a sense of awe. We imagine the freedom Hsieh may have experienced in contrast to the passage of time in our own lives.
Installation view. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York
The exhibition is constructed like a scale model of Hsieh’s life experiences. We see photographs taken from every day of his first four strenuous pieces, experiencing time at an accelerated rate, but at the same consistent intervals he charted his progress. Beginning each with a shaved head, his hair is almost the only discernible change over the spans of the first two projects, while the latter two show a vast number of environments. The small spaces between each room even estimate the “life time” (rather than “art time”) of less than one year Hsieh passed between each piece.
“Why did he do this?” a six-year-old girl asked aloud what we were all wondering. Walking through and imagining myself attempting and failing any similar feat in a fraction of the time, I perceived the work as effective social commentary. After all, no matter how much I assume Hsieh suffered, many people’s real-life situations are even more perilous, as they live in prison cells or unhoused involuntarily and indefinitely.
Tehching Hsieh
One Year Performance 1981–1982 (Outdoor Piece)
Alternatively, it is easy to see Hsieh as a trendsetter. Today, online influencers gain followings through any number of stunts, from, like Hsieh, living in intentionally difficult situations, to the more inane, like counting up to a million or eating dangerous quantities of food. Hsieh likewise often welcomed audiences. While living in his cell, he opened his studio for six-hour periods, allowing anyone to come and see him in person. Living outdoors and then with Montano, he advertised public meetups via flyer.
But Hsieh claims neither of those ambitions. He says he struggled when he first moved to New York, undocumented, spending six years feeling like he just went back and forth between his home and the restaurants where he worked. He asked and answered himself: “What am I looking for? I am already in the piece.” Art comes from life, and life’s most basic and important element is time.
Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978–1999 is on view at Dia, 3 Beekman Street, Beacon, New York
Bisa Butler
Les Amoureux du Kinshasa, 2025
After Amoureux Au Nightclub, 1951-1975 by Jean Depara
Cotton, silk, lace, sequins, netting, vinyl, glass rhinestones, plastic beads, and velvet, quilted and appliquéd
95 x 59 inches
Photo by Mark Woods. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles
Bisa Butler’s Hold Me Close at Jeffrey Deitch is a reflective meditation on forever, negotiating our allowances to seek closeness in one another in a polarizing and alienating landscape disfigured by reality, by today. Where reality warps our sense of relationality to time and place, it is such that Butler’s intricately woven and layered mosaics of memory, whether contrived or lived, speak to a far more precedented truth that is largely absent in works of the contemporary American canon. Butler’s work is truthful and radical, a headstrong resilience narrating the stories of each person stitched into memory. In each depicted face, whether solemn, or overjoyed, we are pulled into their complex and vivid worlds. The works are full of life and detail, and I contemplate how they can be so easy on the eyes and yet distinctly subversive. Layers of tinted fabric composite countless pieces into faces, projecting color onto each world the characters inhabit. Intricate embroidery overlays each face, elevating the cosmic feeling that comes about when viewing the pieces in stillness for a while. The images that form begin to take shape and breathe–we really stand before the people we look upon, peering into their inner worlds and the intimate moments they exchange among each other, between us and them.
Butler’s journey was more complicated, having come into the medium as a young art student. She explains, “Professionally, I made my first quilt when I studied art at Howard in my B.F.A., but I was a painting major. I really didn’t have the license to go canvas-free until I took a fibers class at Montclair State, of which the whole entire fibers curriculum was probably initiated in the ’70s by white women, feminist professors who pushed that all art students at Montclair State had to not just have the regular foundations–which was drawing, painting, sculpture, design–but they also pushed that you had to have fibers and jewelry making. Thank goodness they did that because I was the beneficiary of it.” From there, Butler took on what came naturally to her and so continued her lifelong dedication to experimentation, to pushing herself across mediums, to endless possibilities. When I ask if she still considers herself a painter, she says, “I feel your creativity ends with you when you stop living. So whatever I put my mind to, I am. Right now, I’m doing fiber, and maybe I’ll do that forever, but maybe not. I’m starting to wander into sculpture, thinking about soft sculpture. Before I’m working, I’m sketching. I’m still designing clothing. I’ve been making purses lately. I remember seeing Jean-Michel Basquiat’s grave, which just reads ‘artist.’ I think ‘artist’ is good, it covers all the bases. I feel like my talent has always been limitless.”
Bisa Butler
Hold Me Close (My Starship), 2025
After Untitled, 1974 by Steve Edson
Cotton, silk, lace, sequins, netting, vinyl, faux fur, and velvet, quilted and appliquéd
90.5 x 54 inches
Photo by Mark Woods. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles
There’s a genealogical nature to quilting, particularly in its ties to Black history both domestically and abroad, that communicates family history, positionality, class, background, ethnic origin, and cultural practices. Butler’s work is inventive and rooted in a knowledge of the history that shapes and informs her work, even though she doesn’t have a direct familial tie to a quilting ancestry–she takes shape and fills a void to synthesize the two sectors of culture she negotiates between, both Black American history and African history. The matrons of quilting have certainly informed her work from a critical perspective, explains Butler, “I went to the Whitney and I see all these quilts on the wall by African-American women, specifically the quilters of Gee’s Bend, which had last names like that of the Pettways. I thought these women were wealthy. I thought each one in the show was a famous artist. You have a show at the Whitney. You have to be making money. I was walking around the room thinking, I got it. I know what I'm going to do now. I’m going to be a fine art quilter just like them.”
Butler not only calls on the women of Gee’s Bend, whose work solidified her aspirations of becoming a quilter, but also the women of Ghana who use varied patterns in their quilting practices to signify fertility, wealth, class, and obscured ruminations on marriage and family, among many other things. So many messages are implicit and visible in her work, but the most engaging component is the various ways in which she subtly reinforces the narrative of the quilts. She establishes a legacy in her lineage, pushing forward what it means to shape and colorize fragmented or disregarded memories that matter. Saidiya Hartman conceptualizes this possibility when she writes on “critical fabulation,” wherein the absence allows for something to grow, for truth to emerge in what the Black artist materializes grounded in a Black historical truth. Butler constructs moving portraits of Black life, and through this, she historicizes a consciousness of her experiences, enmeshing them with ruminations on community, love, and her own familial ties. We don’t know who each subject is, but they are real, and we see their most intimate and honest forms when we look at them in these portraits. Butler expands the possibilities of the quilting canon, directing and dialoguing new approaches to the discipline by working through the absence of an archive, and by narrativizing the social and political themes of her work. She takes on the question of Black joy and resilience in the face of growing political and social tensions in the United States, suggesting that in order to feel seen, one must seek safety in a tender closeness. Through this, she stewards what we know to be true across cultures, languages, and even words: that our memories are shaped by those who help us feel safe in our daily lives.
Butler traces some of her earliest quilting work to her own family, crediting her father for the materials that opened the door to the themes she continues to unpack in her work today. She explains, “One of my first quilts was an imagined portrait of my grandfather. My father’s from Ghana, born in 1939 in a more rural part of Ghana in the north. Very agrarian. And he doesn’t have any photographs of his dad, so I never knew what he looked like. That’s always been in my mind, you know, what did my grandfather look like? What did he sound like? What was he like? I decided that I would find a photo of an elderly northern Ghanaian man because they have a specific kind of look. When African people see me, especially if they’ve traveled extensively, they know not only that I’m Ghanaian, but they’re like, ‘Oh, you’re from the north.’ It’s something about the sort of long narrowness of my face and my nose. So, I found a picture of a man, and I made my first quilt.”
Bisa Butler
Coco With Morning Glories, 2024
After Coco, 1993 by Dana Lixenberg
Cotton, silk, lace, netting, tulle, sequins, glitter, beads, glass gems, metal beads, silk and polyester woven fabric and velvet, quilted and appliquéd
84 x 55 inches
Private Collection
Photo by Zachary Balber. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles
“I was using my father’s dashikis from the ’60s because I couldn’t afford fabric. I asked him, ‘Do you mind if I use these?’ not thinking. I just wanted African fabric because I thought this would be a good way to tell the story of a man from Africa. But it wasn't until it was done that I realized, oh, these are my father’s shirts. My father is one of those people who’s worn cologne his whole life. When I go into his room or touch his things, I can smell his cologne, and his shirts faintly smell like cologne. My grandfather's DNA is in my father. My grandfather’s DNA was in the portrait I made of him.” Butler’s lifelong dedication to her craft was solidified after this first project. “After seeing the Whitney exhibition on quilts at that time, I felt successful with that portrait. I felt like my father loved it. I loved it.”
An archival project in a stream of consciousness, Bisa Butler intentionally selects her materials to immortalize those who came before her in the fabric of time and memory. Perhaps this is what her larger project is: to solidify people in textural form. Textiles woven and stitched into each other, culminating into a whole that feels like we’ll know them forever. The exhibition was born out of our political time–the isolative, alienating properties of emotion Butler was working through. They leave us with a desire for our own versions of the depicted affections on display, a brazen introspection. Coco with Morning Glories (2024) depicts a pregnant woman looking into the distance contemplatively, a soon-to-be mother filled with warmth and hopefulness. She reflects, “Theorizing what I would put together really came from this moment that we’re in...I called the show Hold Me Close because that’s how I was feeling, like, goodness, I need somebody to hold me because I’m feeling terrified all the time. And that’s not a good state to be in. When we’re in a time of crisis, human beings, we usually band together. I was looking for images of people who were engaged in comforting each other, lighthearted moments, intimate moments. It could be mother and child, or father and child, lovers, friends. Most of the pieces in the show feature two people in them. There’s one with a very pregnant woman…. My grandmother had ten kids, and I was having my first daughter. I think I was exactly nine months pregnant. I was like, ‘I cannot wait for this baby to be born.’ My grandmother said, ‘This is the best time. You don’t realize it. Your baby is totally safe right now. You don’t have to worry. Are they cold? Are they tired? Are they hungry?’ The pregnant woman is also holding her baby very close.” Bisa Butler’s world of love is endless, is forever.
Magnificent Production by Vaginal Davis, MoMA PS1, 2025. Photo: Isabella Bernabeo.
text and photographs by Isabella Bernabeo
Magnificent Product marks Vaginal Davis’s first major US institutional show, presenting art from her early Los Angeles projects to her more recent Berlin-based creations. Organized thematically instead of chronologically, the works take viewers on a journey filled with vivid colors, humor, and emotion.
Magnificent Production by Vaginal Davis, MoMA PS1, 2025. Photo: Isabella Bernabeo.
The exhibition begins in a light mint-green room titled Naked on my Ozgod: Fausthaus – Anal Deep Throat. This square room features green sheer curtains along every wall, with hundreds of photos from Davis’s early Los Angeles years covering the walls behind the fabric. Visitors are invited to slowly peel away the fabric from the wall to get an intimate view into Davis’s personal life before seducing them into the next room. This section is inspired by one of her first art exhibitions, originally held at the Pio Pico Library in Los Angeles.
In the next space, HAG, Davis reconstructs her old Sunset Boulevard apartment in Los Angeles, the site where she produced many iconic zines, such as Shrimp, Yes, Ms. Davis, and Sucker. The dimly lit room glows pink and includes a walk-in box in the center. Inside, its walls display drawings and figurines of a woman’s head, possibly self-portraits. The slanted floor creates a warped, unbalanced environment that meshes reality with fantasy, just like the work it supports.
Magnificent Production by Vaginal Davis, MoMA PS1, 2025. Photo: Isabella Bernabeo.
Another engaging room in Davis’s collection is HOFPFISTEREI, where visitors are encouraged to interact with her artwork. A table and four chairs occupy the room’s center, surrounded by piles of Davis’s zines, writings, and creations. A photocopier stands nearby for visitors to print out copies to take home.
Davis also utilizes a screening room, which resembles the Cinerama Dome movie theater that operated on Sunset Boulevard from 1963 until 2021. Here you can watch low-fi videos she created during the 1980s, showcasing her range of personas as an artist, queer activist, self-proclaimed “Blacktress,” and more. These recordings, much like the earlier photos, give visitors a detailed and in-depth view into Davis’s life; they’re a testament to how interconnected her art is with her identity.
Magnificent Production by Vaginal Davis, MoMA PS1, 2025. Photo: Isabella Bernabeo.
Another striking installment is from her Wicked Pavilion collection, displaying a reimagined version of Davis’s teenage bedroom. However, instead of her in the rotating bed, a large phallic sculpture sits in the space. The room is completely pink, from the walls to the rug to the curtains. A miniature desk sits in the right corner, topped with two lamps, a pile of jewelry, and an array of colored nail polish, hinting that Davis’s has relished dressing up as the showstopper she is since her youth.
Along the ceiling, dozens of images are hung from a clothesline. These photos are of Davis’s muses, such as actor Michael Pitt or actress Isabella Rossellini. While visitors take a look around the bedroom, they listen to a mix of the song, “A Love Like Ours,” from the 1944 film Two Girls and a Sailor, interviews that Davis herself conducted for LA Weekly in 1996, and a voice message from Davis’s own secret admirer, creating a fully-immersive experience.
Magnificent Production by Vaginal Davis, MoMA PS1, 2025. Photo: Isabella Bernabeo.
Across all of these works, Davis’s playfulness and defiance shine through. Magnificent Product is a living experience that can be overwhelming at times, yet each room offers a sense of freedom. Davis commands her viewers’ attention—and she intends it that way.
Magnificent Product is on view through March 2 @ MoMA PS1 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
Mariko Mori: Radiance at Sean Kelly, New York, October 31 – December 20, 2025, Photography: Jason Wyche, Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York
interview by Alper Kurtul
Tokyo’s energy, New York’s boundless creativity, and Miyako Island’s quiet, almost womb-like protective nature. Japanese artist Mariko Mori redefines light, time, and space as she moves between these different worlds. Her latest project, Radiance, brings together ancient stone spirituality and advanced technology to make the invisible visible. Her self-designed home, Yuputira, which she dedicates to the sun god, is not merely a living space for her; it is the architecture of becoming one with nature. Ahead of her upcoming retrospective, Mori shares with us both the source of her creativity and the enduring meaning of silence in the contemporary world. Read more.
In the summer of 2012, I visited the decommissioned St. Joseph’s Orphanage in Burlington, Vermont, with the polymathic visual artist and writer Abbey Meaker for the first and only time, to bear witness to her documenting the space. Upon entering, I knew nothing of the premises or its history, except that it was the former residence of her grandfather and great-uncle, whom she had never known. The air had an inexplicable weight to it, as though it were filled with lead particulates, and it felt like my heart was being held in a vice. I later read numerous violent testimonies from the children who lived there and about those who were disappeared, like Abbey’s great uncle. We also visited the nearby Mount Saint Mary’s Convent, which had a wholly inverse energy. Its private chapel bathed in natural light felt like an ebullient sanctuary. Still, what connected the two spaces, which had undergone minimal modifications since the late 1800s, were the former living quarters in each. A haunting chiaroscuro was created by the sunlight’s dauntless efforts to break through the shutters, curtains, and blinds that covered each window, all of which remained after the buildings had become inoperative and left in dire states of disrepair. Thirteen years later, Meaker has curated the resulting images into a book of photographs called MOTHERHOUSE that serves as an uncannily vivid portrait of what it felt like to occupy these illusory spaces. Read more.
