and art-agenda editorial is now e-flux Criticism
Mediatized murder is a good way to get attention. Here, the line between celebrity and monster is gossamer, mixed up in a culture of antiheroes and gunslingers, fuzzed out by the noir tradition of cinematic murder—in which both Taxi Driver and ***** (and Jafa’s 2016 breakthrough, Love is the Message the Message is Death) indulge.
This exhibition foregrounds aesthetic and thematic deviations from traditional depictions of Indigenous life. Its title, which translates as “Leaks of our own. Indigenous visualities from south to north,” promises escape from the obligation to explore ancestral themes within the supposed conventions of a tradition preserved in aspic, unchanged since pre-Hispanic times.
Francesca Woodman’s images of her solitary, nude silhouette, backlit against large over-bright windows, hang with Justine Kurland’s photographs of entwined lovers and Carla Williams’s three-quarter length self-portraits, her hand clutching at her chin, her hair, the collar of her white striped robe. There is desperation in these images; the violence of need, and the existential shadow of insatiability.
To quote the organizers, the overarching idea of the biennial is to spur “the paradigm shift toward a livable and sustainable future on our planet. The key tools to achieve this objective are, without doubt, participation, collaboration, and awareness.” [It] tries to set an example for making and visiting exhibitions by minimizing shipping, and commissioning projects that are locally informed and realized; where one installation was marred by wrinkled vinyl, the images were not reprinted to save materials, for example. Yet I found myself questioning what role artists have in the whole endeavor.
Since the highly contested survey “Magiciens de la terre” at Paris’s Centre Pompidou in 1989, reflections on globalization, and efforts to shift this paradigm, have been a feature of the biennial circuit. “Ten Thousand Suns” seems to tack away from the global as an organizing principle and to search for other ways of describing space, at once more fragmentary and more pluralistic.
Vija Celmins’s latest show is at once an invitation to marvel at the perfect copy and to contemplate copying itself. The heavy rope that seems to hang down from the gallery ceiling is, in reality, a stainless-steel sculpture extending up from the ground (Ladder, 2021–22). Its adjunct, another piece of painted steel, Rope #2 (2022—24) sits coiled on the floor, playing its role as a fiber weave with equal conviction.
The transformation of the Polish Pavilion from a horror show into something closer to a miracle is a remarkable story. Last year, a jury predominantly aligned with the country’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party selected painter Ignacy Czwartos, whose nationalist-realist paintings support the right-wing narrative of Poland as a martyr of German and Soviet occupation absolved of complicity in Nazi-era crimes, to represent the country. After the Polish public voted out PiS, the decision was reversed.
In contrast to ruangrupa’s challenge to basic capitalist imperatives at Documenta 15, the international exhibition of the 60th Venice Biennale failed to match an inclusive selection of artists with a comparable reimagination of the format in which they are exhibited. By importing the Global South to Venice on terms set by the Global North, it leaves the task of a radical intellectual response to the overarching theme of “Foreigners Everywhere” to the national pavilions.
The exhibition is far from polemical: its emphasis lies squarely on artistic practice and the interior lives of artists. Through unexpected choices and combinations, in a presentation that spans two levels of the gallery and incorporates a number of collection interventions and public space projects, curator José Da Silva brings together works from vastly disparate traditions under the unifying thematic “Inner Sanctum.”
Unlike literature or art, music appears to be nonrepresentational, at least at first. “But music also is a place of sorts,” says musicologist Holly Watkins, “replete with its own metaphorical locations, types of motion, departures, arrivals, and returns.” Songs articulate distance, texture, and intent. They respond to the acoustics of landscapes and social structures; they are amplified in some spaces and dampened in others. By listening to sounds—and the way they have been transcribed, adapted, and memorialized—we can trace otherwise invisible political interventions into landscapes and soundscapes and, in return, understand these interventions as documents, instructions, or scores.