and art-agenda editorial is now e-flux Criticism
Sukaina Kubba’s first major UK show centers the artist’s obsessive questioning of how far the recognizable elements of Persian rugs—traditionally based on floral or geometric motifs and textured wool—can reasonably be stretched while maintaining their identity. Crafted from a host of industrially derived materials, using an equally wide range of tools, these works trace paths many degrees removed from their design inspirations.
The elaborate opening sequence conveys a heightened awareness of the present and the surreal feeling that a catastrophic future has arrived too soon. This combination is central to Lu Xun’s poetry collection Wild Grass (1927), in the introduction to which the author emphasized pieces addressed to the political moment (namely the 1926 massacre of unarmed demonstrators on Tiananmen Square). These are, Lu writes, “small pale flowers on the edges of the neglected hell.”
By connecting the capacity for play to the possibility of freedom—imaginative and political—Wilson-Goldie instead suggests that the activity might be valuable precisely because it is a “diversion” from the paths laid by those in power. Because it allows us to imagine alternatives to futures that are otherwise presented to us as inevitable, play is not a distraction from but a precondition of change. And so it is suppressed by those who cannot countenance a future that does not recapitulate the past.
Until recently, the German author’s photographic habits and motivations have mostly been gleaned from interviews—he died in 2001—and from the books themselves, in which images of characters, landscapes, architecture, and historical disaster may or may not match the “real” thing. So many ways of saying: They are not illustrations, you know. What, then?
Adriano Pedrosa organizes the 60th Venice Biennale around two broad identity rubrics: “Queer”—a metacategory that includes anyone “who has moved within different sexualities and genders,” along with outsider, folk, and Indigenous artists—and “Foreigner.” In a departure from the Biennale’s usual emphasis on contemporary makers, more than half of the featured artists are deceased. Folkloric, salt-of-the-earth vibes dominate: the mood is wholly at odds with the bland cosmopolitanism at play in terms of who shows up and how the work gets presented.
None of the artworks in “Chasing the Sun” are as innocent or whimsical as they appear. Paintings such as Sun, Moon(s), Strawberry, and Cotton Candy are made of pigments and molten beeswax plunged into layers of grout cased in aluminum. The objects include a silk paper kite (Mozi Kite) and a black inner tube (Chambre à Air), but also a Molotov cocktail, a slingshot, a handmade rifle, and sandboxes for stacking rocks and throwing knives.
Po Po conceived of these works in the 1980s, when Myanmar was under military rule and isolated from the wider world, but became disilllusioned with artmaking after the bloody student protests of 1988 and only recently returned to the idea. So despite the works’ outward resemblance to “contentless” abstraction in the Western tradition, they are better understood as part of the artist’s longstanding investigation into signs, symbols, and codes in a censored society.
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.