Some words are meant to be read. Others, insists Shilpa Gupta, must be walked through. In her current solo exhibition, ‘What Still Holds’ at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, both approaches prove essential. The Mumbai-based artist confronts…[read on]
A massive shipping crane and a set of bleachers towered out of the water, moored somewhere in the middle of Venice’s lagoon. A subwoofer droned through the pouring rain, its fine plastic covering the only fragile-looking…[read on]
On the top floor of KodlContemporary, Bianca Argimón’s meticulous color pencil drawing ‘Hubris’ reads like a grotesque allegory painting. Stretched across the paper’s surface, the scene encompasses detailed vignettes ranging in tone from darkly humorous to stark…[read on]
Forms of measurement are essentially arbitrary, the “foot,” after all, is based on a human foot. The “hand,” used to measure horses in the Anglosphere, is based on a human hand. The legendary Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami…[read on]
The focus on music in this year’s programming at the Hamburger Bahnhof is indicative of a larger trend that has been going on for a number of years, but has really picked up…[read on]
Returning from last week’s preview of the Venice Biennale, the question of scale is on my mind. In recent years, biennials have had a tendency to downplay themselves, opting for…[read on]
For the first time since the 1990s, Berlin is hosting a major exhibition by Marina Abramović, an artist who needs no introduction. Through her performance art, she has…[read on]
Sun pours into Dafna Maimon’s Kreuzberg studio on a spring day in March, as we greet each other and prepare for our conversation about the role of the abject in her practice,…[read on]
At Hua International, works by Marianna Uutinen, made 30 years apart, manifest and indulge in many things, of which the body is one. Though the artist herself would not necessarily…[read on]
Jagoda Bednarsky is known for her large-scale paintings of other-worldly, dreamy landscapes, where body parts merge with nature. Breast mountains, cockerel flowers,…[read on]
Abjection and power go together like Deleuze and Guattari, but it’s not always clear which one is in charge. Power dynamics lie at the heart of human relationships, but they’re…[read on]
Abjection often conjures images of horror—filth, ugliness, death—in their most visceral, corporeal form. Yet what we tend to neglect are abject forms of the mind…[read on]
