By Alice Hattrick

Adam Christensen, 'Smell of Intuition', 2015, installation view as part of 'I'm Here But You've Gone', Fiorucci Art Trust. Courtesy: the artist and Fiorucci Art Trust; photography: Lewis Ronald.

‘I’m Here But You’ve Gone’ is the result of a ten-month collaboration between the Fiorucci Art Trust and Creative Perfumers. Eight London-based artists were commissioned to make scented installations for the Trust’s first fully-fledged exhibition at its HQ in Kensington. I hear that 400 people went to the opening but when I go to 10 Sloane Avenue with a friend it’s just us. The front entrance of smells like ‘freshly boxed products’: rubber, synthetic materials, freshly applied adhesives and newly pressed cardboard (‘Untitled’, by Magali Reus). We lie on a bed in one of the rooms at the top of the house, our faces in sheets that smell like they’ve been slept in. (Adam Christensen’s ‘Smell of Intuition’ – the result of mixing the scents of brown things together – has infused into the pocket of his Raf Simons cord jacket, which hangs in the wardrobe). The space makes us want to misbehave – it’s the domestic environment and the fact we’re unsupervised. There are directions and maps but there don’t appear to be any rules. Downstairs in the laundry room, warm and moist from the heat of the boiler, we inhale Celia Hempden’s Lupa, ‘vagina perfume’. I automatically compare it to the smell of my own and find affinity and difference: not mine.

The Fiorucci Trust’s exhibition comes at a time in which contemporary artists are increasing engaging with scent within the gallery context. As part of Anicka Yi’s ‘Divorce’ at Canal 47 last year, she showed Washing Away of Wrongs (2014): two stainless steel dryer doors that opened onto holes in the gallery wall. Inside diffusers emitted two scents designed by French perfumer Christophe Laudamiel – Traennen (fried food and soggy cardboard) and Bullfrog– that attempted to undermine the myth of domestic purity and gendered bodily self-care by implicating mess, contamination and dirt. ‘I’m Here But You’ve Gone’ is indicative of a broader turn towards the ‘chemical’ senses in contemporary art, promising to counter the insistent privileging of the eye.

Anicka Yi, Grabbing At Newer Vegetables, 2015,
Perspex, agar, female bacteria, fungus, 215 × 62 cm. Courtesy: 47 Canal, New York, and The Kitchen, New York; photograph: Jason Mandella.

For ‘You Can Call Me F’ at The Kitchen, New York, this spring, Yi filled the space with the scent of Gagosian’s Madison Avenue gallery – ‘the ultimate patriarchal-model network in the art world’. This mixed with the smell of another, less defined, less mobilized network: the women of the New York art world. To produce Grabbing At Newer Vegetables (2015), Yi and a synthetic biologist from MIT, Tal Danino, cultivated bacteria donated by one hundred female artists, collectors, dealers and curators on a bed of agar. The smell was bad and, unlike the smell of Gagosian, overpowering. It described the threat of a body that refuses to smell ‘clean’ and ‘pure’: to smell of nothing, like a gallery space, fresh air or clean water.

According to Hippocratic doctrine, stagnant water, decaying plant matter and corpses released miasma, or ‘bad air’, which explained why people got sick in some places and not in others. Hippocratic theory is dead but, as Yi’s work shows, ‘bad air’ is still associated with women’s bodies as sites of both contagion and intoxication. We keep them away from each other in case the infection spreads. (It was Michel de Montaigne who wrote that, ideally, a woman should smell ‘of nothing’.) As Yi says in the first episode of her Lonely Samurai podcast, a series of conversations recorded at New York’s Chapter Gallery, titled ‘What Was Collaboration?’: ‘What I observe are a lot of females that are ambitious and intelligent having to cut themselves off in order to succeed.’ By making bodily odour pervasive and visible – you could see the bacteria, the antithesis of bodily care and the sterile gallery space, growing – Grabbing At Newer Vegetables reminds us of the insistent materiality of bodies within a network.

Pamela Rosenkranz, ‘Our Product’, installation View. Photograph: Marc Asekhame

Perfume, on the other hand, plays into the fantasy of losing one’s body, becoming virtual, fluid, diffuse – vapourous, even. As a mist, perfume is able to penetrate objects, escape containers and take up spaces. For the Swiss Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, Pamela Rosenkranz filled the space with a pool of lightly churning scented water the colour of a standardized central European skin tone. The artist tasked perfumers Dominique Ropion and Frédéric Malle with designing a scent that approximated the liquid monochrome. Our Product (2015) describes flesh as fluid, and the distinctions between the ‘organic’ and ‘synthetic’ as equally diffuse – perhaps they have even evaporated.

For Rosenkranz, scent provides a metaphor for identity as a synthetic construction. Perfumes are mixtures of ‘natural’ and ‘synthetic’ materials – plant extracts and molecules isolated in labs. Synthetic aromachemicals have largely replaced animalic and plant-based materials in commercial perfumery, and are often designed to replicate the effect of so-called ‘natural’ ingredients. (Famously, Albert Baur first developed nitro-musks – predominant in Chanel No. 5– during his experiments with TNT in 1888). We have incorporated these chemicals into our bodies and our sense of selves. The cyborg body, as Donna Haraway put it in her famous ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985): ‘was not born in a garden […] it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust’. The notion of bodily ‘purity’ is used to sell products that are anything but: perfume, cleaning products, cosmetics, bottled water. (Of course, flesh is used in advertising to attract us to all number of products: the more skin, the more attention an ad gets.)

Elaine Cameron–Weir, venus anadyomene 1 (detail), 2014, clam, neon, transformer, ceramic, olive oil, mica, wick, sand, incense, brass, chain, clam, 34 × 71 × 56 cm

The paradoxical fabrication of ‘natural’ beauty was also the subject of Elaine Cameron-Weir’s exhibition ‘venus anadyomene‘ at Ramekin Crucible in New York last spring. The show featured several giant clamshells (venus anadyomene 1–5, 2014) containing olive oil, sand and mica, and resins of benzoin, myrrh and frankincense heated over a flame. Their title – from the Greek ‘Venus rising from the sea’ – refers the story of Aphrodite, born whole from the sea, unsullied by the process of human birth. The shell, featured in treatments of ‘The Birth of Venus’ by Botticelli (1486) and William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1879), is a symbol both of the goddess’s divinity, her purity, and of her carnal form: simultaneously toilette and vulva.

The scent of the Gagosian Gallery was captured and re-created for Yi by the artist Sean Raspet. Last year, for his show ‘Residuals’ at Jessica Silverman Gallery, Raspet the collected air samples from the exhibition space, which were sent away to analyze its particular scent profile. This was then re-created as a micro-encapsulated ‘scratch-n-sniff’ emulsion that was sprayed on the gallery walls. The artist also incorporates scented products into his sculptural work: works in the ‘Arbitrary Embodiment’ series (2013–14) combine fragranced hair gel with polypropylene and silicone in Perspex containers on steel shelving units. Raspet negotiates functional perfumery – the practice of scenting everyday products – at the level of molecular chemistry. This is culture at its most abstract but also its most valuable: the level of the patent (his more recent work has involved manipulating Coca Cola’s chemical formula).

Sean Raspet,
Arbitrary Embodiment (A09), 2014, Polyvinylpyrrolidone in HDPE container in hair gel [water (aqua), carbomer, hydrolyzed wheat protein, PVP, glycerin, triethanolamine, sodium hydroximethylglycinate, polysorbate 20, tetrasodium EDTA, fragrance], cyclomethiocone, on steel shelving unit
Cube: 36 × 36 × 66 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco

By its nature perfume is reproducible – fragrances are patented formulas, which are nevertheless marketed as unique and personal. Sometimes, reproducibility can be part of the appeal – celebrity-endorsed perfumes, for example, sell the fantasy that a scent can re-create a lifestyle. The packaging of ‘clean living’ – of which scent, or scentlessness is an implicit part – as an advertising or corporate branding strategy is something that many artists have mimicked of late, in a form of ambiguous critique. For example the curatorial collective DIS’s contribution to this year’s New Museum Triennial (curated by Lauren Cornell and Ryan Trecartin), This Island (2015), comprises is a horizontal shower-come-kitchen unit fabricated by luxury appliance maker Dornbracht; the piece is activated by a (clothed) female performer who lies in the shower every Saturday. As with many pieces in the exhibition, the work gestures towards the absorption of technology into the human body, but it also explores the idea of cleanliness and purity as commodities that can be bought and sold. In a similar vein, Ed Fornieles’s contribution to ‘I’m Here But You’ve Gone’, Cornucopia, the unbearable lightness of being (2015), figures personal choice as predictable, even formulaic, and the ‘modern family’ as yet another marketing product. The scent is a mixture of ready-made fragrances, rather than perfume ingredients – the best-selling perfumes for mothers, fathers, daughters and sons. Emitted from a small hole in the eye of a young girl in a mock-perfume advert, the mixture is overwhelmingly sweet, familiar and somehow diluted. I have to climb on the toilet to get close enough to smell it.

DIS, The Island (KEN), 2015, mixed media installation created in collaboration with Dornbracht and co-designed by Mike Meiré. Courtesy the artists; photograph: Heji Shin

In recent years, major institutions have started to engage with perfumes as art objects. ‘The Art of Scent 1889–2012’ at the Museum of Art and Design, New York, in 2012, was former perfume critic for the New York Times, Chandler Burr’s attempt to raise modern perfumery to the level of artwork and included Aimé Guerlain’s Jicky (1889), one of the first based on synthetic molecules that heralded the beginning of modern olfaction, Oliver Cresp’s Angel for Thierry Mugler (1992), which Burr associates with surrealism, and Daniela Andrier’s ‘neo-brutalist’ fragrance Untitled (2010). Last year, Comme des Garçons, the Japanese fashion label known for its unisex ‘anti-perfumes’ that smell of things like warm metal and oxygen, produced a fragrance for the Serpentine Gallery. According to the promotional material, Serpentine is an attempt to capture the smell of ‘nature in a city’: grass, asphalt and pollution. Tracey Emin – who made her name by challenging notions of feminine cleanliness – designed the packaging.

Comme des Garcons, Serpentine, 2014. Courtesy: Serpentine Galleries; photograph: Plastiques Photography

Back at Sloane Avenue, in a top-floor bedroom, Patrizio di Massimo’s contribution to ‘I’m Here But You’ve Gone’ (Odour of Sanctity, 2015) is encountered in a ‘miraculously’ leaking urn. As the Biblical narrative has it, to be mortal is to stink of sin – Adam’s original sin. Divine bodies smell sweet and beautiful; living bodies smell of what they consume and digest. They smell of where they have been and what they have been doing. In death, they decay. The corpses of saints don’t corrupt as normal bodies do. Saint Thérèse de Lisieux’s corpse smelled of roses and Saint Demetrius’s tomb in Thessalonki still reeks of myrrh. Di Massimo’s version smells like sweated-off moisturizer, in a nice way. After all, fragrance works through disappearance and transformation: people leave their scent on their clothes, and in the spaces where they have been. Scents linger and evaporate, making meaning through dissipation, at once present and invisible, visceral and intangible.

Patrizio Di Massimo, Odor of Sanctity, 2015, urn with perfume. Courtesy: the artist and Fiorucci Art Trust; photography: Lewis Ronald.

There are several artworks downstairs – leftovers from a temporary installation by Nick Mauss, Franz Wests wrapped in plastic, a Helen Marten wall piece. What, then, is ever fully gone? I think of the invisible labour it takes to scent a whole house-come-exhibition space: refilling diffusers, bottles, urns and coat pockets – a domestic kind of maintenance, or care.

When we leave Sloane Avenue, it’s all up our noses. We can smell everything on the street, everyone’s perfume, car exhausts, and food, our ‘chemical’ sense heightened. You get that when you leave the perfume floor at Liberty too.

By Dan Kidner

Still from '5m 80' (2012) by Nicolas Deveaux, part of the themed section at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival

On my way back from this year’s Oberhausen Short Film Festival – a week-long festival of experimental and artist-made films, and the world’s oldest short film festival – I read an article online about Microsoft’s new ‘augmented reality’ headset, the HoloLens. Rather than create a fully immersive virtual environment the HoloLens augments one’s immediate environment with stereoscopic (3D) images. The promotional video for the device gushes that this blending of the digital world and the ‘real world’ will take users ‘beyond the screen’. Interestingly, beyond the screen there seem to be yet more screens: users in the video are shown working, and watching movies, on virtual flat screens that can be moved and resized within one’s digitally enhanced home or workspace. Despite its name, the HoloLens does not create true holography; it still depends on stereoscopy to create the illusion of depth. Whether the HoloLens will be adopted, or suffer the same fate as Google Glass, remains to be seen. What is clear is that augmented reality is likely to change the way we work with and consume images, or at least offer one more digital platform from which to do so.

The limits and uses of stereoscopy were on my mind after spending several days watching, for the most part, rather pedestrian 3D films, brought together in this year’s themed programme at Oberhausen entitled ‘The Third Image – 3D Cinema as Experiment’. Curated by filmmaker Björn Speidel, the programme surveyed mostly recent films that exploit aspects of stereoscopic image-making technologies. As such it felt at times like visiting a visual effects conference or trade fair rather than a film festival. In Nicolas Deveaux’s 5m 80 (2012), a succession of animated CGI giraffes are shown jumping from a diving board into a swimming pool. Aurora Borealis 3D (2015), a film by ‘holographer’ Nakamura Ikuo, depicts the Northern Lights accompanied by a sweeping orchestral score, and wouldn’t have been out of place in a planetarium. Here, though, it felt misplaced and its corny portentousness even induced hysterical laughter in the late-night audience. Ora (2011) by Philippe Baylaucq captured the choreography of dancer and choreographer José Navas using ‘3D thermal imaging’ – apparently the first film to do this. Ora was also one of a number of films in the programme to feature gratuitous shots of the female form ¬– especially notable in light of the dearth of work by women in the programme, an omission acknowledged by Speidel in his catalogue text: ‘Where are the female filmmakers?’ he asked rhetorically, without providing an answer.

Lucy Raven, ‘Curtains’ (2014)

Within a programme that privileged invention and technical mastery over critical enquiry, there were just a few works of historical experimental film and even fewer works by contemporary artists. The latter category featured Sebastian Buerkner’s The Chimera of M. (2013) and a recent film installation by Lucy Raven, Curtains (2014). Shown as a standalone work in one of the smaller screens at Oberhausen, Curtains was able to retain some critical distance from other works in the main programme. The work consisted of 3D still photographs of office spaces of post-production houses that deal with outsourced 2D to 3D transfer work for Hollywood studios. Over the course of 50 minutes, the separated red and blue plates of different photographs are introduced to the screen, scrolling slowly from left to right and right to left, meaning that for one second, as the plates meet and overlap, the patient viewer is rewarded with a fleeting stereoscopic image. In respect to the programme as a whole, Raven’s work was rare in that it fulfilled the requirement of actual stereoscopy whilst also maintaining a dialogue with works of experimental film concerned with vision and perception, such as Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) or Hollis Frampton’s _ (1971), as well as more recent film and photographic projects that examine the types of alienated labour produced by global capitalism, such as Noël Burch and Allan Sekula’s _The Forgotten Space (2010).

Nakamura Ikuo, Aurora Borealis 3D, 2015

Representing the history of experimental film were early pioneers Mary-Ellen Bute and Norman McClaren, and ‘structural’ filmmakers Paul Sharits and Ken Jacobs. Bute’s presence was especially significant given her status as one of the first experimental women filmmakers and her role in setting up the Women’s Independent Film Exchange. Two films by Jacobs were included – Opening the 19th Century: 1896 (1990) and Capitalism: Child Labor (2006) – but if it hadn’t have been for the enforcement of the strict organizing principle of actual stereoscopy, then earlier – arguably more interesting – work from the filmmaker on the theme of perspective might have been included. The same could be said of Sharits, who was represented by the only stereoscopic film he made, the rarely screened and recently restored 3D-Movie (1975). It was fantastic to see it, but more for its scarcity than anything else.

Peter Greenaway, 3×3D, 2013

One film that examined the nature of perspective in the cinema from a more historical and philosophical position was Jean-Luc Godard’s The Three Disasters (2012). Using mostly found footage, Godard meditates on the deceitfulness of perspective in cinema per se, and mournfully intones in a mumbling voiceover, ‘truth is loved so much that even liars want what they say to be true.’ The work is actually part of the film 3×3D, commissioned by the Portuguese city of Guimarães to mark its celebrations as European Capital of Culture, which include sections directed by Peter Greenaway and Edgar Pêra, whose contributions fall somewhat short of Godard’s critical tour de force. Thinking critically about issues such as depicting space in film and video, and the myth that innovation in moving image production technologies will bring the viewer more ‘real’ representations of the world was left to a number of quality films spread through the rest of the festivals many profile programmes, competition strands, archive presentations and distributor selections.

Zhou Tao, Blue and Red, 2014

In Laure Prouvost’s We Know We Are Just Pixels (2014), showing in the international competition, digital images ruminate on becoming conscious and breaking through the screen, whilst distributor EAI screened Jacolby Satterwhite’s The Country Ball (1989–2012), which was made by feeding his mother’s drawings of cakes and home videos into 3D animation programme. There were also many films that explored the relation of technology to shifting social relations: Zhou Tao’s Blue and Red (2014) brought together scenes of crowds bathed in the light omitted from LED billboards in the city squares of Guangzhou and in Bangkok to form a composite city teetering on the edge of unrest; and in Beirut Exploded View (2014), screening in the international programme, Akram Zaatari created a world using architectural fragments on the edge of some scrubland in Beirut where social relations are mediated by mobile phones. These films and a number of others across the programmes, thought differently, and in a nuanced way, about the production of the illusion of space in film and video. But on the whole, this year’s Oberhausen offered slim pickings for those wanting to think critically about new image making technologies and their application.

By Kurchi Dasgupta

Army officers rescuing artworks from the National Academy of Fine Art, Kathmandu

It is afternoon in Kathmandu and I sit at my laptop, grateful that my internet connection is holding up despite the five or so jolts that have registered on the Richter scale since this morning. The recent earthquakes in Nepal have brought upon the country a level of destruction that defies comprehension – in just three weeks almost ten thousand people have died (more than half the number claimed by the decade-long civil war). Many more face a bleak future.

What possible relevance can art have in such circumstances? As soon as the first tremors hit, the National Academy of Fine Art (NAFA) came tumbling down and its annual exhibition had to be hastily removed from the building, along with the national archive of priceless traditional and Western-influenced modernist artworks. Right now a traumatised Chancellor, artist Ragini Upadhyay Grela, is running NAFA from a temporary structure in one corner of the building’s grounds. Given the central role the NAFA has in the Nepalese art world, its difficulties, even if temporary, constitute a major setback for both the traditional and contemporary artists whose careers are bound up with this institution.

Even more severely damaged have been the buildings of Lalitkala Campus, the first Nepali centre for arts education, which since its founding in 1934, has produced the bulk of the country’s artists. The situation is so bad that relocation appears to be the institution’s only option. Its MFA programme, in the town of Kirtipur, may only resume after major architectural repairs are carried out and, according to the department head, Seema Sharma Shah, ‘exams are indefinitely postponed’. Kathmandu University (KU) has not fared much better. Its buildings are torn by cracks and fissures. However, hope remains that the university can reopen within the month at a new location. Srijana College of Fine Arts, the country’s first privately run art college, has also been badly damaged and its students are in a state of limbo, uncertain as to their future.

At this time of crisis the arts community has rallied round impressively. Many arts institutions and individual artists are involved in building shelters for the homeless before the monsoon season hits, or are otherwise active in delivering relief materials to remote communities. Sujan Chitrakar, the Director of Painting and Design at KU, and acclaimed ceramicist Gopal Kalapremi Shrestha, have both led students on missions to rebuild parts of the decimated Bungamati village, on the edge of Kathmandu valley. In addition to searching for and rescuing villagers from the rubble, the students are building shelters and toilets for those whose homes have been destroyed in the quake. Artist Milan Rai is doing an amazing job of improving sanitation in badly affected areas, and fellow practitioners Hitman Gurung and Sheelasha Rajbhandari, through their community arts organization Artree, have made similar efforts in the devastated ancient township of Bhaktapur.

The effects if the earthquake are not only material. Many citizens of Katmandu are already feeling the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder. Three artists from the city have lost their lives, whilst at least fifteen more have been injured. Rabita Kisi, a young artist with whom I have worked in the past, has lost her home, her mother and her son. The artist Sushma Shakya, nominated for the Sovereign Prize last year, lost her left arm trying to save her father. Such stories pour in every day – hundreds of artists and students have been made homeless by the crisis and the death toll continues to rise due to the effects of shock or exposure to the severe rains. It is as yet unclear what effect the crisis has had on those artists living in more far flung areas of the country.

Museums have also been badly hit. Although most of the millennia-old artefacts in the National Museum at Chhauni have been rescued and stored in a safe location, sections of the building remain structurally unsound and cannot be entered, putting part of the collection at risk. The Patan Museum of sacred Nepalse art, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, also shows signs of minor damage. The Taragaon Museum, which charts the history of the city of Katmandu, has major cracks running across its walls. The Hanuman Dhoka Palace Museum, home to an unparalleled collection of objects relating to the recently toppled royal Shah dynasty, is so severely damaged that hopes of its restoration seem like nothing more than wild fantasy.

‘The art scene will have to start again from scratch,’ says Sangeeta Thapa, who heads the Kathmandu Contemporary Art Centre as well as the Kathmandu International Festival (KIAF). Her own space, Siddhartha Art Gallery, has had to be shut down due to structural damage, and the prospect of organizing another KIAF is currently unthinkable. Other commercial and non-commercial art spaces have also been affected. Bikalpa Art Centre and Artudio – art spaces for the young – have suffered heavily because of the quakes, whilst Bindu Art Space, Artist Proof Gallery and The Park Gallery have all sustained damage that has either forced them to close or rendered them barely operational. Lasanaa, a project space run by the renowned artist Ashmina Ranjit, was undergoing organizational restructuring and relocation when the tremors hit and now needs immediate funding to ensure its survival. Only The Nepal Art Council and the small commercial gallery Newa Chen hope to continue with their exhibition programmes.

City Museum, a popular new space, has been adversely hit on more than one front. Controversy has surrounded ‘Urban Myths 3’, a group show exploring contemporary Nepali urban life, which opened in early April. A mixed media work, depicting the Living Goddess Kumari of Kathmandu with a printed ad for condoms collaged onto her divine forehead, has attracted complaints from the Newar and Hindu communities. They revere Kumari, a pre-pubescent girl selected by the local population to be the living incarnation of the goddess Durga or Taleju, as a protective deity for the city. The work, by artist Sudeep Bhalla, was intended to encourage viewers to reflect upon the objectification of women in Nepali society. But many locals now believe that the earthquakes were caused by the Kumari’s wrath at the desecration of her image. As a result Kashish Das Shrestha, the space’s founder-director, has been threatened by community leaders, issued with an First Incident Report from the police and is currently evading arrest. My own solo exhibition, which would have opened there last month, has been postponed indefinitely.

But even as fanaticism rears its ugly head some old social boundaries are crumbling. A fundraiser at Gallery MCube in Patan brought together two disperate strands of the local artworld, pairing the work of senior Nepali artists (such as Shashi Bikram Shah, Birendra Pratap Singh and Shashikala Tiwari) with that of younger performers Anil Subba and Ritesh Maharjan. At the opening, in a small, darkened room in the gallery Subba hung from a hook on the wall. His performance with Maharjan began as a digital timer sprung to life, counting down from 7.8mins, as sounds of destruction and extracts from local news broadcasters FM News _and _Zeitgeist droned from the speakers. All the while Subba flailed about helplessly, groaning into a microphone. On the floor lay the naked, supine, vulnerable body of Maharjan. The event, the duration of which stood in for the Richter Scale measurement of the first, terrible quake, conjured up the sense of threat experienced in the intial moments of the disaster. At a time when many are still in denial over the physical and psychological scars incurred by recent events, this jarring work of art constituted an important first step in the process of acknowledgement and acceptance.

Maharjan and Subba’s performance is just one example of the important psychotherapeutic function that art can provide in this context. Many artists are running much-needed art therapy and counselling sessions for children and adults, not only in Kathmandu, but in more remote towns and villages. Sadly, there is little financial support for these activities. What money there is comes from independent fundraising events for general relief, such as Gaynor O’Flynn’s international programme Artists for Nepal, but none specifically is meant for the arts community, except crowd-funding drives such as my own on Indiegogo. Further support has come in the form of contributions from online galleries such as eartsnepal.com. A fund from the NAFA is currently being planned.

Such financial difficulties are not a new problem for artists in Kathmandu. Even before the quake struck, the Nepali contemporary art scene was operating on tight margins. Whilst antiquities and artworks made according to traditional methods enjoy remarkable local and global popularity, contemporary artists from the country rarely experience comparable commercial success. There is no state funded museum for the display of contemporary art in Nepal, and only a handful of commercial galleries and exhibition spaces show such work. The postponement of KIAF, the country’s one international platform for artists, could plunge the arts community into obscurity for years to come unless something is developed to take its place. Artists depend upon sales, or on salaries from teaching positions, in order to survive. With the market stagnant, and the galleries and art schools closed, many artists will find it impossible to go on. What they need now, more than anything, are informed curators and institutions who can provide them with a space to work and exhibit outside of the country. The end of the civil war was the trigger for a new wave of artistic experimentation in the country which risks being lost if the Nepali artists are cut off from the wider world.

By Becca Voelcker

Mikhail Karikis, 'The Endeavour', 2015, split screen installation. Courtesy: Tyneside Cinema

Is that a smeuse? Am I only seeing it now that I know its name? I’m reading Robert Macfarlane’s latest book, ‘Landmarks’ (2015), on the train to Newcastle upon Tyne to see Mikhail Karikis’s film installation, ‘The Endeavour’ (2015), at Tyneside Cinema. The book gathers words denoting elements of the landscape from dictionaries, idiolect, slang and poetry. Smeuse: ‘the gap in a hedge made by regular passages of an animal.’

I spot smeuse after smeuse from the train window. Macfarlane argues that by calling things by their name we notice them anew. There are words for stones and rubble (chucky, feldspar), and certain kinds of mud (muxy, rout). Each word carries an oral history that Macfarlane fears is being eroded. He laments that the new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary has uprooted ‘acorn’ ‘pasture’ and ‘willow’ for a crop of indoor, virtual words. For ‘blackberry’, read ‘Blackberry’. I like that the editions mark the ebb and flow of language, but I see Macfarlane’s point. If we use old words, we might reconnect with places, or ‘sing the world back into being,’ as he puts it. Singing and voicing are at the heart of ‘The Endeavour’, Mikhail Karikis’s third solo show in the UK, which continues his engagement with the voice as a medium for discussing community and vanishing industries. The work was commissioned by Tyneside Cinema’s curator, Elisabetta Fabrizi (formerly BFI’s head of exhibitions), as part of Karikis’s residency at the cinema gallery.

Mikhail Karikis, ‘The Endeavour’, 2015, split screen installation. Courtesy: Tyneside Cinema

‘The Endeavour’ explores the effects of post-industrialization on social landscape and is thematically linked to Karikis’s previous video installations, including ‘SeaWomen’ (first shown at the Wapping Project, London, in 2012) and ‘Children of Unquiet’ (created for Art Sheffield 2013). ‘SeaWomen’ documents a diminishing workforce of aged female divers collecting pearls in South Korea. They make non-verbal sounds as they dive, to aid breathing and to communicate – a fast dwindling form of vocality, locally and professionally specific. ‘Children of Unquiet’ engages the voices of children in Tuscany whose parents faced redundancy from a geothermal power station. ‘The Endeavour’ takes its title from the last fishing vessel repaired in a boatyard in South Shields, near Newcastle. Karikis filmed the boatyard in the weeks before its master boatbuilder, Fred Crowell, retired and the yard – the last of its kind and a hundred years old – closed. Endeavour seems a fitting name for the labour of love apparent there. Tyne and Wear once produced a substantial portion of the world’s ships, but during the Depression unemployment reached 74%. During WWII its shipyards contributed to the war effort but later suffered again due to competition from the Far East.

Mikhail Karikis, ‘The Endeavour’, 2015, split screen installation. Courtesy: Tyneside Cinema

In Karikis’s ten-minute video, which is looped and split between two screens suspended from the ceiling, we see Endeavour being repaired. Like Tacita Dean’s ‘Kodak’ (2006) and Ben Rivers’s ‘Sack Barrow’ (2011), The Endeavour carefully documents the twilight of an industry. We track past walls of well-worn tools, many of which were unfamiliar to Karikis – their names even more so. Indeed, these names inspired his focus on obsolete words. Like Macfarlane, Karikis enjoys reanimating underused words: beside the gallery hangs a poster containing some of the 1,600 he collected whilst filming, many of which feature on the soundtrack. It reads as a roll call for dock labourers (hobblers), fishmongers (jousters) and, most crucially, shipwrights: builders and repairers of ships.

Karikis’s architectural training is evident when we are introduced to the boatyard’s side-view, back-view and facade, before a pan creates an architectural section of the interior. When the left screen swallows a wooden plank fed through a saw in the right, the video itself becomes part of the machinery. There are static shots of water lapping into the yard, and winter sunlight gilding rust and sawdust – here the screens are like windows. Sometimes Karikis cuts to black, echoing the snatched and divergent rhythm of the soundtrack. We hear shipwrights, machines, seagulls and a choir and harmonica. But there is little room for maudlin nostalgia in such a busy ensemble. Karikis emphasises that, despite imminent closure, Crowell’s was a cheerful place. We hear joking as the shipwrights take a break. The North East is diverse in idiolect, and the men’s Tyneside accents locate their community and profession.

Mikhail Karikis, ‘The Endeavour’, 2015, split screen installation. Courtesy: Tyneside CinemaTyneside Cinema.

Karikis worked with a local choir who recite ‘hobbler’, ‘jouster’ and so forth like a protest song accompanying the images on screen. The unfamiliar words develop new dimensions, Karikis explains, re-voiced and re-imagined into little sonic sculptures. Meanwhile, the harmonica plays a tune that redundant shipwrights sang as they marched in protest from Jarrow to London in 1936. Both sound elements add to the historical context of ‘The Endeavour’. The harmonica’s reference to Jarrow also helps connect the film to the cinema: Karikis discovered that Tyneside Cinema’s founder, Dixon Scott (best known as Ridley’s great-uncle) was a social reformer who part-funded the Jarrow March and opened several cinemas with the aim of offering shipwright audiences enlightening material. Next year is the 80th anniversary of the March and Karikis was keen to reprise this duet between cinema and labour, for fear that it be forgotten.

‘The Endeavour’ chimes with Tyneside Cinema’s own endeavour to offer communities a screen, a stage, an ear and a mouthpiece. Located upstairs in the cinema, the gallery transforms into an auditorium each night, showing first run films as well as films related to the exhibitions. Since opening last autumn, it has housed installations by Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, Rachel Reupke and John Smith, among others. Tyneside Cinema’s chief executive, Mark Dobson, sees the organization’s role as paramount at a time of local and national change. Public funding cuts continue, industries are changing and many city-centre buildings have been repurposed as artist studios. Once fairly homogenous in ethnicity, Newcastle is home to a growing immigrant community, further enriching its pool of accents – actual and metaphorical. Institutions like Tyneside Cinema and films like ‘The Endeavour’* suggest we can learn from the past and invent a lexicon for contemporary contexts, filled with words and strategies for the future.

By Juliet Jacques

Guy Sherwin, Portrait with Parents, 1974, 16mm film still. All images courtesy: Guy Sherwin and LUX, London

Following its inception in 1966, the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, conducted numerous experiments that were often more strident than subtle. Amongst the many artists who developed within the Co-op’s orbit, Guy Sherwin stands out for the gentleness of his work, particularly in his Short Film Series, recently released on DVD by LUX, which has a sense of calmness rarely matched in the output of his contemporaries.

Sherwin was not the only Co-op artist to focus on domestic situations, as he does here with works involving his family or his home. Nor was he alone in documenting natural beauty: the parks and country lanes that he often features were popular with Sherwin’s peers, who also experimented with exposure or changes of speed to condense long stretches of time. But the distancing techniques of certain Co-op filmmakers – Peter Gidal’s Condition of Illusion (1975) highlighting the terms of its own representation of reality, or Annabel Nicolson running a film of herself through a sewing machine (Reel Time, 1973) so that it disintegrates before an audience – are less overt in the Short Film Series, as Sherwin focuses on building a direct connection between his viewers and his subjects.

Having studied painting at Chelsea School of Art during the late 1960s, Sherwin taught film printing and processing at the Co-op in the mid-1970s, where he began to make the films included in LUX’s compilation. As it can be watched in any order, Sherwin’s series may seem ideally suited to a DVD release, but the technology to allow viewers to choose their arrangement did not exist when he started the project. These films belong not to the age of the iPod Shuffle, or even the CD, but of John Cage’s aleatoric compositions, or novelists such as Marc Saporta or B. S. Johnson putting unbound pages or chapters in boxes, assuming different meanings depending on the sequences in which people read them.

The films span from 1975 to 2014 (although Sherwin took a long break between 1980 and 2000, when he worked on other film projects, besides making five in 1997-98), and were always made according to the same formal constraints: they last the length of one 16mm film, approximately three minutes; they are black and white; and they are silent. Although not narrative works, they tell stories of sorts, providing snapshots into domestic life or the natural world. Birds and trees appear regularly; a pet cat stars more than once; the collection is bookended by a film made with Sherwin’s parents in 1975 and another made with his son Kai Foo in 2013, with his daughters Maya and Mei also having works dedicated to them.

Stylistically the 34 works collected here (with their titles, year and location of filming given on postcards) sit between Sherwin’s more abstract Optical Sound Films (1971-07) series and his figurative Messages (1981-05) collection, also issued on DVD by LUX. The Optical Sound Films, made between 1977 and 2007, explored the ‘physical correspondence between sound and image’, often working directly with 16mm film, where sound and image are both carried in visual form on the same strip, rather than being shot with a camera. In fact one of the Short Films, entitled Night Train (1977) became an optical sound film two years later, when the horizontal lights shot on a London to Birmingham train were doubled up onto the soundtrack. Another entry, Sound Shapes, matched four shapes punched out of black film with noises scratched into the soundtrack, organised into a bar structure. The resultant work feels like one of Steve Reich’s percussion pieces, giving the impression of chance elements in its composition while actually being heavily structured, as Sherwin explained in the accompanying book.

These short films often use changes of exposure, to ‘fully exploit the tonal range of black and white stock’, as A. L. Rees put it in his History of Experimental Film and Video (2011) Sherwin’s notes for the Short Film Series explain that Metronome (1978) followed the late afternoon sun on a mantelpiece over an hour, recorded in time lapse of one frame per second. The metronome phases into time with the spring-wound mechanism of the 16mm camera – as in many of these works, sound and light are highlighted as fundamental components of cinema. There is often levity, however: viewers may note the black square behind the metronome as the film opens, alluding to to Kazimir Malevich’s influential Suprematist piece, but when Sherwin’s camera moves closer and the exposure brightens, we see that it is actually A Young Woman Seated at the Virginal (1670), widely attributed to Jan Vermeer.

In their tone and subject matter these films are closer to the Messages series. With little camera movement, the Messages works often built tension through their use of close-ups: Flight focuses a bird on a branch, giving a sense of pent-up energy until it suddenly and dramatically flies out of shot. Sherwin’s films are often poetic, with the casual observation of the beauty, boredom and sadness of daily life that made Jacques Prévert’s Paroles so moving: his 34-minute Messages (1983) quoted from developmental psychologist Jean Piaget and his daughter Maya’s words and drawings in an attempt to represent the world from a child’s perspective.

The most touching works in this collection are those covering three generations of Sherwin’s family. Portrait with Parents (1975) was his first entry into the Short Film Series. Sherwin’s parents stand in front of a mirror, with his father holding a camera and taking a photograph; his mother is half in, half out of the shot. She speaks, but we cannot hear her words, her emotions conveyed only by her face turning into a smile. There is a danger of Sherwin falling into sentimentality, which he averts with the familiar Co-op tactic of exposing the method of the film’s construction, pulling back to show his own reflection as he cranks the camera.

Cat on TV (1977) wryly presents a tiny domestic drama. We see a scene from a typical 1970s living room: a TV set with an aerial on top, with curtains behind it. A black and white cat sits by the aerial, its head cut off by the top of the frame, its tail hanging over the horse racing being broadcast. Will the pet obscure a crucial detail, or knock over the aerial and end the broadcast altogether? When the cat decides to change its position, there is a climax and conclusion, and only then does it feel obvious that we have been watching a story unfold.

Elsewhere films of industry and of nature contrast with each other. In Columns (1977), one of the most dynamic entries, the camera pans across a Kings Cross demolition site; in Coots (1997-98), Sherwin super-imposes one shot of young birds diving and surfacing over another, shown upside-down and backwards to create ‘a visual palindrome’. This trickery recalls some of the idents that BBC2 used to introduce programmes in the late 1990s, and adds to the sense of homeliness. The Optical Sound Films may have worked better in a gallery or Expanded Cinema setting, but the Short Film Series perfectly suits a domestic environment, and my viewing was enhanced by external noises (my housemates boiling the kettle, or the birds in our garden), which I would have found intrusive in most other contexts. Even in their silence, the Short Film Series generate as much sound as John Cage’s most famous ‘composition’, and provide just as much space for quiet meditation.

The DVDShort Film Series 1975 -2014 is available now from LUX: http://lux.org.uk/shop/products/dvds/short-film-series-1975-2014-guy-sherwin

By Valentin Diaconov

The new home of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, designed by OMA/Rem Koolhaas. Photo: Yuri Palmin

On the day of the opening of the new Rem Koolhaas-designed Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow earlier this month, the museum’s employees resembled laboratory mice – bloodshot eyes, skin a shade only slightly darker than white. Not everything was finished, and the building will be tweaked for months to come. For now, the double-layer polycarbonate panels that make the facade a wavy mirror that reflects the surrounding Gorky Park are transparent by default, and that makes the building open to all kinds of daylight that is not always friendly to the museum displays. This is not a bug, but a feature of OMA and Koolhaas’s original thinking behind the project.

After leaving the original location that gave the museum its name when it was founded by Dasha Zhukova in 2008, Konstantin Melnikov’s former bus depot on Obraztsova street, the Garage moved to Gorky Park in 2012 and dwelled in a temporary structure designed by Shigeru Ban, while waiting for a permanent location nearby. The owners originally wanted to rebuild a six-part Constructivist building by Alexey Schusev, erected in 1923 for the first Agricultural and Industrial Expo, now in a state of dramatic disrepair. But Koolhaas persuaded them to look 100 metres away, to a dilapidated cement block that was formerly home to the Vremena Goda restaurant, built in 1968. (‘Vremena Goda’ translates as ‘Four Seasons’. In 1968, there were no hotels of this chain in the USSR, so the name is a coincidence). During the two years of the museum’s construction, Koolhaas praised late Soviet architecture for its openness, as well as its unforced urge toward collectivity – a far cry from the Stalinist Empire style, but a tamer, softer version of earlier Constructivist ‘machines for living’.

Opening of the new Garage, June 2015. Photo: Egor Slizyak, Denis Sinyakov

The new Garage’s polycarbonate panels are the most visible architectural intrusion here: most of the details and floor plans of the original building have been lovingly preserved, along with a wall-length mosaic that depicts a young girl flying amongst abstract splashes of colour – typical decoration for the public spaces of late socialism – and large expanses of dark green tile on the walls. The mandarin orange-painted cloakroom and the toilets with doors that stretch from floor to ceiling are just a handful of design decisions that are Koolhaas’s new additions to the look and feel of the building. It seems that Koolhaas has rebuilt a non-descript edifice full of local histories (most Muscovites of a certain generation have, at one point, had beers or Soviet cognacs here) and not much else. This is in fact a continuation of his decades-long project to steer the conversation away from deconstructivist gestures and novelty forms and toward the idea of preservation as a necessity for today’s oversaturated architectural landscape. Interesting, though, how even this humble ideal can look arrogant: a denial of gesture as an ambitious show of force. After all, Koolhaas takes something that has neither obvious historical nor architectural value and by sheer will turns it into a landmark, one of very few buildings in Russia that has the name of a starchitect attached to it.

The response from the architectural community suggests that Koolhaas’s building is shockingly relevant and forward-thinking. Russia’s leading architecture critic, Grigory Revzin, praised the new Garage for demonstrating the unrealized potential of 1960s Soviet architecture: ‘This is not a restoration of the Soviet sixties,’ Revzin wrote in his review for the newspaper Kommersant (full disclosure: I am a staff writer for the same publication). ‘This is a utopia of Soviet sixties […] There is mastery here. There is quality of space, details, effects of the transparent staircase, complex perspectival see-throughs. You should come here if only to understand how Soviet architecture could look.’ But architect Ilya Mukosey, in his overenthusiastic article for Archi.Ru, compared the new Garage to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) and noted, in bold: ‘Ruins of modernist, or “contemporary”, architecture are not an exhibit of the museum. The whole museum – the ruin and the restoration – is its own exhibit.’

Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo: Yuri Palmin

Comparing the new Garage to a readymade and a utopia of unrealized construction ideals are both good points. If we mix these metaphors, we see Koolhaas’s building as the first example of Sots-art architecture – a decidedly Soviet iconography and quality encased in an international dialogue about what contemporary architecture can look like. Like an Eric Bulatov painting in 3D, or, to take another example, something like Dmitri Prigov’s classic poem about a policeman who drinks beer at the Soviet House of Writers cafe and does not even register the usual patrons: ‘Ars longa, vita brevis, and in their struggle life wins out’, go the last lines of the poem, perfectly describing the challenges that the Garage’s curatorial team will have to face. A masterpiece it supposedly is, but does it serve its intended purpose? Can it be a museum?

The first programme of shows, prepared by resident curators Kate Fowle and Snejana Krasteva, takes the lead from the building. The assortment of small exhibitions looks surprising for those who have come to enjoy the grandeur of Russian oligarchs’ conspicuous consumption. Granted, the usual high-profile guests were there for the opening – Larry Gagosian, Jeff Koons, even Woody Allen and George Lucas – but the shows, apart from a couple of installations by Yayoi Kusama, are far removed from blue-chip glamour. There is a retrospective of Rirkrit Tiravanija with an Eastern European twist: Tiravanija includes a series by Czech conceptual artist Julius Koller in his show. A reconstruction (in a reconstruction) of the 1959 American Fair in Moscow’s Sokolniki Park, and the subsequent Soviet Fair in New York, courtesy of the Museum of New American Art (Berlin), takes up a third of the first floor.

Exhibition view of the Garage’s opening programme. Photo: Egor Slizyak, Denis Sinyakov

Curators Koyo Kouoh and Rasha Salti prepared a historical account of African and Arab cinema produced during the heyday of Soviet cultural diplomacy in the regions. A project by the Garage Youth team (people in their 20s of various professions employed by the museum) is an adequate snapshot of what the 1960s looks like to millennials, complete with a comic strip on Soviet dissidents who went to Red Square in 1968 to protest the USSR’s invasion of Prague. Although the medium of a cartoon comic is frequently used for serious subjects in the Western vernacular (Art Spiegelman’s Maus [1980–1991], recently translated in to Russian, is the perfect example), in Russia it is rare enough to be considered ‘new media’. What these shows have in common is that they all centre on cognitive capital, not the bank accounts of the owners, and this is a welcome strategy in highlighting the values of the new Garage: a sprinkling of blue chip with a strong intellectual undercurrent: the museum as knowledge factory, a nearly object-less entity that produces relations, not passages or passivity.

Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo: Yuri Palmin

And for this goal, Koolhaas’s building works. It is not a white cube that assumes the usual role of an impartial container to sustain in its clean, spacious halls the post-industrial, post-war promise of the avant-garde, disengaged from political pressures and the logic of capitalist vitrines.

Exhibition view of the Garage’s opening programme. Photo: Egor Slizyak, Denis Sinyakov

By making the space’s previous function and decor stare unflinchingly through the museum content, Koolhaas presents a powerful argument against the amnesia of the new. Here one feels the solid locality of a slab of history – not just Soviet history in its pure form. It is comparatively easier to present a contemporary art programme in a building that bears traces of ideologies that are alien to neo-liberal or post-structuralist thought that prevails in the art world discourse (Munich’s Haus der Kunst is a good example). But the character of the new Garage is both ideologically recognizable (through the style of the mosaics) and elusive: this was never a utopia, just a restaurant, built quickly and modestly. People who drank here had all kinds of conversations, both loyal to the State and wary of its waning delusions of imperial grandeur, as far removed from Marx as today’s Russia is from the Czars. Those fleeting conversations almost no one remembers were the fabric of everyday life. The new Garage’s programme will have to either strive to show art as part of this fabric, or invent new curatorial strategies that circumvent the context Koolhaas has created.

Valentin Diaconov is an art critic and curator based in Moscow, Russia.

By Valentina Sansone

Brody Condon's performance streamed live at the opening of Momentum 8. Photo by Vegard Kelven.

The 8th edition of Momentum, the Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art, takes place in Moss, a small industrial city in the Oslofjorden. The coastal town, 54 kilometres from Oslo, is mostly known as the place where Edvard Munch spent four years of his life. It’s a somewhat claustrophobic town, if it weren’t for the stunning landscape of the fjord, lightened by the late-hour brightness of the summer season. For that reason, Moss feels like the perfect location to explore the them of this year’s biennial – chosen by curators Jonatan Habib Engqvist, Birta Gudjonsdottir, Stefanie Hessler and Toke Lykkeberg: ‘Tunnel Vision’.

Momentum 8 reflects upon the isolating conditions of our contemporary networked era, as well as the role of different kinds of obsession in artistic practices: artists who devote their life to one single field of research, or the repetitive actions of Conceptual performances. The obsessive refrain of ‘Tunnel Vision’ immediately materializes in Julius von Bismarck’s Jugendbewegung (Youth Movement, 2015) at Momentum Kunsthall, traditionally the main location for Momentum and one of the two main venues of this year’s Nordic Biennale.

Julius von Bismarck’s ‘Jugendbewegung’ (2015) at Momentum Kunsthall. Photo by Vegard Kleven

Here, a driverless Polo car constantly revolves on its own axis. The day of the opening, the artist occupied the driver’s seat of the vehicle, and a few days later, Von Bismarck, whose work often deals with motion and rotating systems, could be found floating within his Egocentric System at Art Basel Unlimited. In Moss, the empty car’s repeated movement recalled the artist’s presence, and, generated by a seemingly malfunctioning device, a sense of potential danger.

Steingrimur Eyfjörd’s ‘The Yellow Earring’ (2015). Photo by Vegard Kleven

Part of the town of Moss is located on the peninsula of Jeløy, where you can find Galleri F15, Momentum 8’s second location. Here, Steingrimur Eyfjörd’s site-specific installation includes a group of sculptures, found objects, collages and paintings from the mid-1980s to the present day, re-assembled for Galleri F15’s space. Based on everyday gestures, Eyfjörd’s The Yellow Earring (2015) recalls the domestic imagery described in Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal’s short novel Too Loud a Solitude (1977).

‘Tunnel Vision’ also addresses what the curators refer to as the contemporary technological society’s version of psychedelia – that is, drugs that have now been developed to ‘narrow down the mind’. In one illustration of this state of mind, large-scale paintings by Chilean-born Cristóbal Lehyt (Untitled, 2013) originated from drawings produced in a trance state. (Momentum 8 places a strong emphasis on Latin American artists, also showcasing works by Rio de Janeiro-based, Catalan artist Daniel Steegmann Mangrané and Mexican born, Berlin-based Brody Condon.)

Christine Ödlund’s ‘Tower of Eukaryote’ (2015). Photo by Vegard Kleven

In the spirit of rejecting strict logic as a methodology for art-making, Polish New York-based artist Agnieszka Kurant worked with a clairvoyant, whose predictions were collected in articles written by journalists, whom Kurant invited to write for a fictional edition of the New York Times (Future Anterior) (2007). Clairvoyant visions also arose in Christine Ödlund’s work: the Swedish artist has been studying how plants communicate. She combines ecological elements with the synesthetic, magic and supernatural. Here she created a powerful intercommunicating system of coloured infrared light, a large-scale diptych, and a spiral garden with a tower of stinging nettles and butterfly larvae (Tower of Eukaryote, 2015).

Zhala’s performance at Momentum Kunsthall, 13 June 2015. Photo by Ingeborg Øien Thorsland

‘Tunnel Vision’ also expands to include effects on gender and political identity. Swedish-born performer, musician and feminist queer activist of Kurdish descent Zhala mixes elements from the club scene in Stockholm with personal issues related to her own identity, origins and history. She often burns Kurdish and Swedish flags during her shows. On the opening day of the biennial, Zhala performed at Momentum Kunsthall on top of the voluminous, coloured-wig-covered installation by Hrafnhildur Arnardottir a.k.a Shoplifter. Zhala also specially conceived a soundtrack for Momentum 8, which can be heard looping up the staircase at the Kunsthall, and which fills the bookshop at Galleri F15 (like a moment ago, when we just stood here, 2015). In another work that pervades the spaces of the biennale, Sissel Tolaas designed a perfume that emanates from mechanical devices placed throughout the exhibition (MOLECULEMOVX_015, 2015), producing a potentially headache-enducing scent.

Valia Fetisov & Dzina Zhuk & Nicolay Spesivtsev in front of screens showing their Paranoiapp mobile application, 2015. Photo by Ingeborg Øien Thorsland

Moscow-based artists Valia Fetisov, Dzina Zhuk and Nicolay Spesivtsev created a custom mobile app, Paranoiapp (2015), which allows anonymous biennial visitors to find you by sharing your location with other users, and vice-versa. Group-related control and surveillance was also the theme of a performance by Brody Condon, who arranged a group therapy session in a private building in Moss, not far from the Kunsthall. Visitors could watch the session being streamed live in the exhibition space during the opening, and can watch a recording for the duration of the show.

Although it brings together several artists from different countries, one of the aims of the Momentum Biennale has always been to address ‘Nordicness’. The question of Nordic identity in the arts has been a subject of recent debate: Last spring, in Stockholm, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, worried about the recent development of the Royal Institute of Art, wrote a letter of protest to the Ministry of Education and cancelled approximately 50% of the year-end student grants a few weeks before the students’ graduation. Amongst the main concerns of the Royal Academy was the ‘total break with the Swedish tradition’. According to their protest, ‘the internationalization’ of schools and professors might establish linguistic barriers between teachers and students. In May, the Icelandic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale was shut by police for ‘security reasons’ after the intervention of Swiss Iceland-based artist Christoph Büchel, who brought the first mosque in the historic city of Venice to a deconsecrated church. In an art world that demands cultural diversity, does geographical or national identification still make sense today? Momentum 8 addresses such issues, asking, above all, should we question ourselves and the consequences of our own tunnel vision?

Valentina Sansone is a contemporary art writer and curator based in Stockholm, Sweden and Palermo, Italy.

By Charlie Fox

Lismore Castle, County Waterford, Ireland

‘Outlandish’ would be the best word for the whole trip. First, let’s note that nothing beats the Gothic thrill supplied by receiving an invitation to a castle: as soon as the thing arrives, I have visions of vampires and ghouls. In fact, this invitation makes a much sunnier but still-bewitching proposition, asking me if I’ll fly to County Waterford, on the south-east coast of Ireland for the opening of ‘The Persistence of Objects’. Masterfully curated by Katrina Brown and Kitty Anderson from Glasgow’s The Common Guild, this exhibition includes works by eight contemporary artists and sprawls throughout Lismore Castle and its environs, including Carthage Cathedral, which nestles in the grounds, and into the streets beyond. Festive marginalia: this exhibition marks ten years of events arranged under the auspices of Lismore Castle Arts, which has built an annual tradition out of setting energetic shows within this rural space. It’s the stuff of a rather strange contemporary fairytale in which a Gothic castle is haunted by sculptures, installations or, as per 2013’s ‘Monuments’ show, a curious architectural folly by Pablo Bronstein. The moral is obvious: we should cheer on reality’s accommodation of such implausible things. I follow the breadcrumb trail and find myself, a few days later, approaching the castle.

Hayley Tompkins, Satellite (detail), 2015, mixed media installation. Courtesy the artist and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd.

Orange, green, gold, brown: the landscape whips past on the journey, luscious and undulant space checkered by the occasional pictograms of distant houses; wizened trees with antler branches and rough manes shake in the breeze. Over a summer day’s radiant span, the contents of the exhibition cause all kinds of trouble inside my mind. What follows from studying these things isn’t knowledge but its opposite, a dizzying and fruitful state of incomprehension where various perceptual certainties are exploded. Remaining in the cognitive wreckage is an abundance of bizarre possibilities and riddles to be unravelled. Even the most stubbornly ordinary stuff is regained as enigmatic and bristling with oddness. Laid out as though for clinical examination, the objects in Hayley Tompkins’s Satellite (2015) (snapshots of the moon, a mobile phone from the early 2000s, a shirtsleeve licked with acrylic paint) radiate a discreetly heartbreaking pathos even as their juxtaposition makes them feel somehow alien. Beyond the castle at Lismore’s austere Heritage Centre, Images, or Shadows of Divine Things (2005–ongoing) by Gerard Byrne passes off photographs shot in the last decade as lustrous street life tableaux from the middle of the previous century, scrambling your temporal bandwidth by indicating how the past ghosts through the present. These are the first pieces I see and they provide an early dose of the weird and soon-to-be inescapable sensation that I’m playing the anthropologist within a fictional world.

Lismore Castle might comprise a world by itself. Roving around I take inventory of some of its magical contents, including a greyhound with a ghoulish physiognomic resemblance to Samuel Beckett that was carved in a honey-coloured wooden wave by the 17th-century sculptor Nicholas Johnson. There’s also a Flemish pastoral tapestry redrafting a scene painted by David Teniers the Younger, in which hearty drunks conduct a makeshift trampoline game. (Everyone, even the watchful donkey, has exactly the same face.) In the dining room there were two earls painted by Van Dyck watching the guests from the walls. At breakfast there’s enough meat laid out on the enormous table to roof a house. Later, when the Gothic pile’s shadows turned jagged across the grass and the midsummer night’s sky is flaming red, I started rubbing my eyes: under an arch of entwining trees I half-expect to glimpse Ryan O’Neal and Leonard Rossiter repeating their Georgian-era duel scene from Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975). In fact, these well-groomed lawns date much further back – to 1650 which, trivia fiends might like to know, makes Lismore’s the longest continuously tended garden in Irish history. The Dukes of Devonshire have counted Lismore among the jewels in their estate since 1753. Evidence of nature is everywhere in the exhibition but frequently in unsettling forms. Wolfgang Tillmans’s long photographic romance with bruised fruit continues apace in ‘Fruit Logistica (I–V)’ (2009), which combines shots of peaches, food packaging and cross-sections of the architectural mechanisms within high-grade printers, providing a slick commentary on how our sense of reality gets warped by endless image reproduction.

Wolfgang Tillmans, from ‘Double Exposure (Fespa Digital / Fruit Logistica) I – V’, 2012, inkjet prints mounted on aluminium in artist’s frames. Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London

Much else in ‘The Persistence of Objects’ basks in the pure textural disorientation that a range of materials can offer. The Mexican artist Gabriel Kuri’s sculpture Platform II (dish stack) (2012) makes unexpectedly menacing use of concrete, wire mesh, a blanket, ‘sponge sheets’ and gravelled latex. Few things express sheer material persistence with the same gnomic force as weatherbeaten rocks, but the real feat of Kuri’s installation within St Carthage Cathedral is to imbue them with fresh and baffling unfamiliarity. The vessel for the first monstrous rock is a tilted rubbish skip. Almost attached – this infinitesimal gulf is painful – to a slope on its other side is a powder-coated metal plate, mirroring the skip’s stance and kept in place by another rugged chunk of stone. It’s title, .)(. (2012), provides a slick diagram of the arrangement but doesn’t account for the oddly tender feelings it induces. I didn’t see the Sunday morning congregation in situ with Kuri’s piece but according to reports the response has been warm, with churchgoers expressing intrigue and attraction. For an assemblage marked by its junkyard scuzziness, the piece looks curiously at home within the cathedral’s stone walls, as if they welcome such a gruff visitation. The rocks (flown over from a Turin quarry) are wonderfully intractable facts, a big physical mystery dragged into fractured communication with other, more prosaic objects. In the cathedral’s light they seem like an oblique account of faith and its perplexities.

Gabriel Kuri, Platform II (dish stack), 2012, wooden pallet, blanket, steel rods, concrete, perspex, wire mesh, ceramic crockery, sponge sheets, gravelled latex. Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London

But the more modest things can be equally startling. Carol Bove’s sculptures operate on a similar frequency. Her weathervane-like assemblage Neptunea Constricta (2015) attaches peacock feathers, seashells and what might be desiccated flesh to its steel antennae and concrete plinth. These are lifeless things, but in Bove’s careful arrangement they acquire a disconcerting power. Aleph (2012) consists of shelves crammed with magickal texts from Aleister Crowley, Jorge-Luis Borges and Edgar Allan Poe, alongside a handful of numinous found materials, including needles, stones and a mink-coated button. For additional illumination, consult this passage on the aleph, the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet, from On The Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, by Gershom Scholem: ‘The Kabbalists always regarded the aleph as the spiritual root of all other letters, encompassing in its essence the whole alphabet and hence all other elements of human discourse.’ Which means, perhaps, that we should treat the dense syllabus and the other ephemera Bove has chosen as an arcane personal index, a fiendishly concentrated codebook to aid our navigation of all her other works. Caveat lector: Kabbalah’s famous impenetrability is also in play here. It’s an ancient tradition where esoteric methods are used to parse sacred texts, which also maintains that genuine knowledge of its revelations is impossible. Such a beguiling sliver of Jewish mysticism allows Bove to arrange a thorny and paradoxical installation, hinting at the occult erudition that shapes her work whilst indicating that the substance at its heart is nevertheless unknowable.

Carol Bove, Aleph, 2012, wood and metal shelves, books and periodicals, steel, brass, stone, feather, mink button, found objects. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, London

Navigation remains hazardous in the Egyptian artist Basim Magdy’s film The Many Colours of the Sky Radiate Forgetfulness (2014). A background hunt for facts reveals that it was shot somewhere in Germany, which is never obvious because this lush conundrum maps out its own dreamy territory. Taxidermy animals and statues remain as the mute witnesses of an unknown political trauma. History has crossed over into delirium: waterfalls are described as ‘the devil throwing up’. These skeins of futuristic folklore provide a route into a bracing meditation on objects as memento mori, carrying premonitory knowledge of death. The film itself appears in an especially sumptuous phase of decay that’s crucial to its fantastical climate, coating the screen with hot sparks, irradiated fur and explosions of psychedelic light.

Steven Claydon, Animated Wavelength (via Harald Bluetooth) (detail), 2015, galvanised steel, stone, radar reflectors. Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London

Meanwhile, back on Earth, Steven Claydon’s sculpture Animated Wavelength (via Harald Bluetooth) (2015) looms in a high and shady recess of the castle’s garden. Three haggard stone busts are fixed above a galvanized steel frame and a trio of black radar reflectors are strung beneath them, creating a neat sequence of non sequiturs. According to corporate lore, the Bluetooth symbol originates from a Danish rune used by the eponymous 10th-century king whose last name commemorated his hellish dental situation. Ambiguous signals abound: the radar reflectors could be relaying data from the dormant brains of those furious busts, acting as the regal symbols for a lunatic dynasty or picking up communicative detritus from the atmosphere. A master trickster when it comes to the provenance of his objects, Claydon sneaks in a twist: these heads may look as though they’ve spent nine hundred years frozen in rage but they were, in fact, carved a few nights earlier by a local stonemason.

Steven Claydon, Animated Wavelength (via Harald Bluetooth) (detail), 2015, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London

If you need a name for the intoxicating epistemological dislocation that Claydon routinely pulls off, ‘sojestiveness’ is unbeatable. Coined by James Joyce in Finnegans Wake (1939), it melts together ‘suggestive’ and ‘jest’ just like Claydon’s works, taking the familiar purpose or history of his objects and turning them to more anarchic ends. For a solo show in 2007, the artist invented his own country (‘New Valkonia’) and exhibited his works as if they were deranged native artifacts, freshly unearthed.

You have to climb through the frame to see the face of the second bust, which is turned, glaring, towards further acres of majestic land. Eyeballing this object I’m just another thing within the landscape for a few moments, gawping. If I were smarter I’d sketch the metaphysical gulf between us and pinpoint exactly where it collapses; I’d adequately express the vertiginous thrill caused by thinking about our twin fate as nothing but dust. It’s more appropriate to stay mute: knowledge is shaky; mysteries are indestructible.

By Mike Watson

Carlo and Fabio Ingrassia, Frammenti di Una Triologia (Fragments of a Trilogy, 2015), pastel on Schoeller paper

Having been selected host city for Manifesta in 2018, Palermo’s art scene is enjoying renewed interest. Whilst it is unlikely that Sicily’s capital will ever be restored to its former cultural prominence, the city still attracts a constant stream of artists and cultural practitioners who have continued to visit since the days of the Grand Tour.

My second trip to Palermo coincided with a residency exhibition involving six young artists. Curated by Valentina Bruschi, the sixth edition of the biannual project ‘Viaggio in Sicilia’, initiated by Planeta winery, is entitled ‘When the Landscape Listens’, a line take from a poem by Emily Dickinson, and it was with poetry and landscape in mind that the curator chose the artists from Sicily, Iowa, New York and Dusseldorf. Last September the group – Adrianna Glaviano, Carlo and Fabio Ingrassia, Paula Karoline Kamps, John Kleckner and Ignazio Mortellaro – was taken on a week-long tour beginning in Catania before moving to Mount Etna, Milazzo, Messina, Noto, Modica and Palma di Montechiaro in Agrigento. They returned this June to Palermo to mount works based on their experiences of Sicily. Visiting the exhibition and, subsequently, talking to the artists, it became apparent that the landscape, culture and food of Sicily had left an indelible mark on those artists who had come from abroad. Even for those living permanently in Sicily (Ignazio Mortellaro in Palermo and Carlo and Fabio Ingrassia in Catania), the experience deepened their understanding of a region seemingly entwined with primordial natural forces, ripe with raw energy.

Ignazio Mortellaro, Ed è subito sera (And Suddenly It’s Evening, 2015)

Whilst socio-political aspects relating to the ‘landscape’ were conspicuously absent, a wider narrative of beauty and the sublime was construed. The resulting exhibition demonstrates that sometimes, beyond all discussion on urbanisation, gentrification and man made climate change, there remains at times only a sense of awe. This is a point well expressed by Ignazio Mortellaro’s piece Ed è subito sera (And Suddenly It’s Evening, 2015), a brass rod measuring 3 metres in length representing the horizon and bearing an inscription of a hermetic poem written by the 20th Century Sicilian poet Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968):

Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
trafitto da un raggio di Sole:
ed è subito sera.

Each of us stands alone at the heart of the Earth
Pierced by a ray of sunlight:
And suddenly it’s evening

The poem is a reflection on mortality, but also upon the entwinement of man and nature. The piece is positioned to reflect sunlight and is aligned perfectly across the East-West axis of the compass.

Adrianna Glaviano, Photograph (2014)

Inside the chapel itself, the works of Adrianna Glaviano and the identical twins Carlo Fabio Ingrassia complement each other. Whilst the former printed photographs of fabrics which appear on first glance to be painted, the latter two artists presented miniature photo-realist pastel drawings. In both cases the depicted scenes represent fragments of landscapes or townscapes saturated in light, like glimpses caught through half-shut eyes, reflecting lines from Emily Dickinson’s poem which describes the oppressiveness of the midday sun in Sicily:

When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath
When it goes, ‘tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –

The Ingrassia twins work obsessively on the same piece, drawing from the outside of an image towards the centre and meeting in the middle. Their laborious studio process results in effortless-looking harmonious compositions such as Frammenti di una Triologia (Fragments of a Trilogy, 2015), which was displayed in the main chapel. Here, the use of colour and shadow evoke the unsettling atmosphere of dusk, continuing the theme of light and shadow as absolutely crucial to an understanding of the island of Sicily.

Paula Karoline Kamps’ trio of large scale ink paintings, also displayed in the main chapel, take a more personal approach to the landscape via an exploration of its effect on the body, both of human and animal. It’s Like no Tomorrow (2015) depicts a moonscape overlaid with a human torso and legs, and several newly hatched turtles. The work is based on the experience of a moonlit walk across the beach close to Menfi in the region of Agrigento, in which the artist witnessed turtles hatching and walking in file across the sand and directly to the sea. The suggested contortion of the human figure, which floats ethereally against a regal Prussian Blue backdrop, meets with the sensation of being blanketed by the depicted sky and moonlight. One senses less a domination of man by nature and more a wilful submission to its cycles.

John Kleckner, Nervous man in a four dollar room (2011)

The strong presence of painting in ‘When the Landscape Listens’ is echoed across town in a group show held at Galleria Francesco Pantaleone. The exhibition, entitled ‘La declinazioni della pittura’ (the declinations of painting) and dedicated to an investigation of the resurgence of painting and the jettisoning of the strict formal distinction between abstraction and figuration, was curated by Ariana Rosica. It includes a work by John Kleckner entitled Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room (2011), based on a collage ‘sketch’ from which the artist diverged during the process of painting. Kleckner, who is based in Berlin, focuses on qualities of light and space, producing images that oscillate between areas of flatness and depth, as well as between abstract fields and figurative elements suggestive of human or other forms.

Gianni Pettena, Werable Chairs (1971), Installation, Collapsable chairs in cardboard

This mixing of visual codes could also be seen at Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Palermo (GAM), where Lorenzo Bruni has curated a show bringing together the architectonic works of Gianni Pettena and the paintings and sculptures of William Mark Zanghi. The latter produces paintings depicting phantasmagoric landscapes populated by dogs who take on quasi-human characteristics. Such an approach mocks the human tendency to project anthropomorphic qualities onto animals and nature. The subject matter could not be more fitting in Palermo, where the city’s population of both stray and domestic dogs move wolf-like through the streets, lurching from shadow to shadow seeking food scraps and water in the city’s oppressive heat.

‘Il Museo Delle Palme’ (The Museum of the Palm Trees), installation view

The relationship between man and nature is also central to ‘Il Museo Delle Palme’ (The Museum of the Palm Trees), a temporary project curated by Giuseppe Buzzotta and Vincenzo Schillaci from the Palermo based artist run ‘L’A Project’ space, in collaboration with Carlo Pratis, director of Rome’s Galleria Operativa. The project re-opened a closed wing of a museum dedicated to depictions of palm trees at the Orto Botanico di Palermo (The Botanic Gardens of Palermo). The collection, amassed by a former museum director is hung salon style from floor to ceiling and features unknown artists alongside established names such as Bruno Ceccobelli. To these works a new collection has been added in a parallel wing, including works by young Italian artists such as Leonardo Petrucci, who designed a wallpaper. At firstit appears to be a generic design of the 1970s, yet on closer inspection the palm trees are accompanied by repeated images of the Red Palm Weevil, a beetle which has devastated palm trees across the Mediterranean since the ‘80s.

Leonardo Petrucci, Coniunctio oppositorum, wallpaper (2015)

Further works – some of which were realised during a two week residence attended by, amongst others, Emiliano Maggi and Matteo Nasini – are to be found throughout the Botanic gardens. Rome based artist Nasini place zig zagged threads of dyed wool clustered together between several Silk Floss trees, making a kind of barrier which will over time accumulate a layer of natural undyed wool which is produced by the trees itself, creating one white woollen mass effacing the form and colour scheme of the artwork.

Such an intervention helps to draw attention to the element of chance always present even in a heavily designed space such as the Orto Botanico di Palermo. The gardens and their buildings were designed by French architect Léon Dufourny to house the faculty of botanical studies of the Accademia dei Regi Studi. Its lavish form bears witness to a time when Palermo was a central power at the crossroads of Europe, Africa and the Far East, a position it held on and off for centuries. This can be seen equally in its Arab-Norman architecture, several examples of which were awarded UNESCO heritage status this month.

However, it’s also clear that no architecture ultimately can compete with the overwhelming sky of the region. As Pier Paolo Pasolini observed while writing The Long Road of Sand (1959), ‘more South than here is not possible’. It is a place dominated by the in-between worlds of midday and dusk. In this respect it will be interesting to see how Manifesta, the ‘European art biennial’ establishes itself in Palermo in 2018. Disregarding fears of looming corruption, and mismanagement of cultural budgets – which are both factors which will have to be contended with in Sicily – it remains to be seen how the hallmarks and trappings of the contemporary art scene will translate against the unremitting backdrop of Sicily’s capital, and nature.

By Jill Glessing

Gruppe Arbeiterfotografie, Stadtplannung für wen? (Town Planning for Whom?), 1978, installation view in the open-air exhibition of the BINA (Initiative of the citizens of the north of the historic center), Cologne.

Punishing unemployment and government austerity still plague Spain, yet its capital continues to display a staggering amount of diverse art. Contributing to the surfeit is the annual photography festival, PHotoEspaña, offering 74 exhibitions across Madrid alone (it is reviewed in the September issue of frieze).

Wealth acquired by this first European colonizer of the ‘new world’ was invested in intensely religious art. At Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza is ‘Zurbarán: A New Perspective’ showing paintings by 17th-century Francisco de Zurbarán (it runs until 13 September). In deep Carravagesque chiaroscuro, Zurbarán’s ecstatic martyrs and bound lambs submit to sacrifice; the edge of a platter made from Latin American gold glimmers beneath a delicate pile of glassine grapes.

No such displays of submission are hosted by the Museo Reina Sofia. Lining up in the tradition of resistance, as expressed in its collection’s cornerstone – Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) – was its PHotoEspana exhibition ‘Not Yet. On the Reinvention of Documentary and the Critique of Modernism’ (it closed 13 July). Photography, film, video and textual materials curated by Jorges Ribalta cover a period during the 1970s and ’80s when artists revived a critical documentary approach used in the early-20th century by such activists as Lewis Hine and John Heartfield (but were then depoliticized and institutionalized through such humanist documentary projects as Edward Steichen’s ‘The Family of Man’ exhibition).

Each of the 16 rooms featured a different regional iteration. Common presentation forms, chosen by these artists for their low cost and easy display, were poster boards and slide projection; shared issues were community access to public space, housing, poverty and workers’ conditions. Two introductory rooms featured work from Hamburg, Germany, from 1973, where the new worker photography movement, and the group instrumental in spreading it – ‘Arbeiterfotografie’ – began. Original display boards with photographs and text charted, for example, the community’s struggle for greater control of public spaces.

Artist/worker collaboration was also revived. Leading up to May ’68, striking workers occupying a French textile factory in Besançon formed ‘The Medvedkin Group’ with Chris Marker, who provided cameras and instruction enabling their self-representation. Alongside workers’ photographs, Marker’s film, Le train en marche (The Bandwagon, 1971) was screened. This homage to the Bolshevik inventor of the Cine Train, Alexander Medvedkin, whose agitprop engaged with newly socialized Russians, acknowledges the tradition and links between periods.

The San Diego Group engaged in workers’ health and housing issues. Featured at Reina Sofia were works by the late photographer and filmmaker Allan Sekula, to whom the exhibition was dedicated; also included were Fred Lonidier’s photo/text installation, The Health and Safety Game (1976) and Martha Rosler’s seminal, and semiotic, photo textual series, The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974-5).

British founders of the Photography Workshop, Jo Spence and Terry Dennett, explicitly evoked the worker photography tradition of the 1930s, and groups such as the Film and Photo League. Their instructive photo-text posters outlined the value of photomontage for activism. Peter Dunn and Lorraine Leeson’s wall-size murals, designed for public display, addressed poverty and health care cuts. Big Money Is Moving In. Don’t Let It Push Out Local People (1981), with its warnings of community displacement by the Dockland’s corporate development, made clear links to Heartfield’s hard and humourous critiques.

Other moments of art activism traversed the explosive politics of the period: documentary photographs of Amsterdam squatters and their violent 1975 eviction; Agnès Varda’s sympathetic film Black Panthers (1968), alongside photographs by Pirkle Jones and displays of the Panthers’ publications that insisted on the party’s self-defense role in inner-city America; and Afrapix photojournalism images of violent oppression published in the South African magazine Staffrider, that helped discredit Apartheid.

Exploring a different cultural strain that developed around the same time is ‘PUNK. Its Traces in Contemporary Art’ at Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (it runs until 4 October). The centre’s director, Ferran Barenblit, has just been selected as new Director for Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). The unemployment and disenfranchisement that accompanied the emergence of the new right and corporate militancy in the 1980s manifested itself in the primal rage of punk music. The 74 works by 60 artists here are meant to express punk’s infiltration into the visual arts. Although drained of the progressive impulse seen in ‘Not Yet’ the works here – as if answering Sid Vicious’ lyric, ‘When there’s no future, how can there be sin’ – revel in nihilism and opposition. Exemplary are two photographs showing Santiago Serra’s monumental negation. His enormous sculpture of the letters declaring ‘NO’, were internationally toured through such urban centres as Miami and New York (Global Tour, 2010). Similarly, Jordi Colomer’s simple, even stupid, but compelling performance video, No Future (2006), follows the artist walking Barcelona’s empty streets at night, banging out the Sex Pistol’s tune on a drum while ringing random doorbells.

Itziar Okariz’s photographs and video seem to tell gender norms and decorum alike to piss off. In ‘Peeing in Public or Private Spaces’ (2001–06) the artist is shown pissing in different locations – a bridge at night, a New York hotel room.

Irreverent disruptions of American iconic symbols is a favoured genre in this show: Ant Farm and T.R. Uthco’s video, The Eternal Frame (1975) shows their reenactment of John F. Kennedy’s assassination; Paul McCarthy’s installation upends Disney dreams with his phallic nose and abject antics (Pinocchio House/Crooked Leg, 1994); and Martin Arnold’s use of optical printing technology violently intervenes in the Hollywood family drama (Passage à l’Acte, Passage to the Act, 1993). The jarring repetition of minute gestures during the 33 seconds of the film, To Kill a Mockingbird, seems to be attempting to reveal the supposed psychosis that lurks beneath patriarchal and gender norms.

The final room of ‘PUNK. Its Traces in Contemporary Art’ is devoted to scatological forays. Among them are Austrian collective Gelitin’s photographs from their book, Das Kakabet (2007) that show the words ‘Punk Traces’ spelled out in fecal font.

Though Paul Graham’s work would hardly fit here, he, too, began to make art under the influence of punk. His milder response was to use colour in opposition to the black and white more conventionally used for social documentary photography. Less assertive than the activist documentary movement, his images are nonetheless indictments of the power and wealth imbalances plaguing contemporary society. An intimate and dreamy collection of photographs from his series and book, ‘Does Yellow Run Forever?’ (2014) held court at Elba Benitez courtyard gallery as another PHotoEspaña offering (it closed until 30 July).

Three subjects in the photographs – of different sizes and hung at different heights – make for a quiet conversation. A wall-size image of a New York gold pawnshop – the kind that has flourished since the financial crisis – hangs close to floor level, inviting identification with the reality of the street. Golden evening light softens the scene. Directly opposite but higher on the wall is a gold-framed photograph of an Irish rainbow in an envelope of grey cloud. An interior square room is further interiorized by five large photographs of a woman lying in bed (the artist’s partner in different hotel rooms). Taken in the early morning, she is deep in sleep – dreaming perhaps of something beyond gold in pots or pawn shops. In each image, the colour of the bedding and walls, like those in a rainbow, are different, suggesting full spectrum dreams. The four facing dreamscapes create an intimate enclosure of calm.

In the aftershocks of economic turbulence, gold has the attention of pawnshops and artists alike. In ‘Glints: Two Origins’, a PHotoEspaña exhibition at Centro de Arte de Alcobendas (which closed 4 July), Magdalena Correa considered precious metal and its circulation across geographies, as both the exclusive economy on which a dirt-poor Peruvian gold-mining community depends and what the filthy rich of Kuwait line their houses with. Seventeen vivid colour photographs (‘La Rinconada’, The Corner, 2014) make amusing commentary on the contrast – the gold, silver and gems that practically ooze, like oil, from shoes, teeth braces, and furniture of the Kuwaiti oligarchs set against the canopy of tin roofs that shelter the Peruvian workers when they aren’t digging in the dirt.

In ‘Other Recent Examples’, at Parra & Romero (which closed 1 August), Alejandro Cesarco sought a more ephemeral gold, mining his own past and other artists and writers’ works. In five photographic works and one video, Cesarco worked through the nature of emotional and intellectual life – how the past infiltrates and drips through the present. Continuing his series of indexes for books he will likely never write is ‘Index (With Feeling)’, (2015). Three wall-size photographs of black text against white ground offer a section of an index that begins with ‘Derrida’ and ends with ‘Montaigne, Michel de’. Besides author and artist references (Horn, Roni; Kawaro, On), the list is a distillation of the artist’s inner life: ‘Failures’ gets six page citations; ‘Expectation’ has five; and ‘Empathy’, one.

Portrait of Robert Walser (2015) is a brilliant depiction of literary production and influence. In the photograph a sheet of paper is taped to a window patterned with security mesh; appearing behind both is a soft focus, brick and blue, urban streetscape. On the page is a typewritten a quote by the author William Gass describing the Swiss author Robert Walser’s ability to suggest fathomless anxiety beneath a simple and pleasing image, something Cesarco himself mimics through this very image. That Walser engaged in multiple and playful references to other authors pushes the already weighty Tower of Babel toward tipping point. Cesarco’s role here was more curator of a group show, alerting us to the vast and historic whispering between artists, intellectuals, authors.

Framing the exhibition, on the first and last wall, are two small black and white photographs, each showing a hand, full of presence and suggestive of touch: Studies for a Series on Love (Wendy’s Hand – Left and Wendy’s Hand – Right) (2015). As with Graham’s meditations, besides crashing currencies and our search for value, art and ethics, we are anchored by our love relations.

1. Zurbarán: A New Perspective
From 09 June to 13 September 2015
at Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
http://www.museothyssen.org/en/thyssen/exposiciones_proximas/121 – ongoing

2. Not Yet: On the Reinvention of Documentary and the Critique of Modernism
at Museo Reina Sofia
February 11 – July 13, 2015 http://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/exhibitions/not-yet-on-the-reinvention-of-documentary – past

3. PUNK: Its Traces in Contemporary Art
at Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M).
26th MAR— 4 OCT 2015
http://www.ca2m.org/en/future/punk-traces-contemporary-art – ongoing

4. Paul Graham: Does Yellow Run Forever?
At Elba Benitez
16 June – 30 July, 2015
http://www.elbabenitez.com/exposiciones/paul-graham/ – ongoing

5. Magdalena Correa: Glints: Two Origins
at Centro de Arte de Alcobendas
07.05 – 04.07.2015
http://www.phe.es/en/phe/exposiciones/5/seccion_oficial_otras_ciudades/377/magdalena_correa_destellos_dos_origenes – past

6. Alejandro Cesarco: Other Recent Examples
at Parra & Romero,
24 JUNE– 1 AUGUST 2015
http://www.parra-romero.com/exposiciones/cesarco2015/cesarco2015.html – ongoing

By Amy Sherlock

Larry Bell, '2D-3D: Glass & Vapor', 2015, London. Courtesy: the artist and White Cube

Since the early 1960s, the American artist Larry Bell has produced a remarkably coherent body of work motivated by an ongoing interest in the interface of light and surface. Associated with the California ‘Light and Space’ movement of the 1960s and early ’70s, Bell lives and works between Los Angeles and Taos, New Mexico, where he moved in 1973. His early cubes, displayed on transparent pedestals at torso height – an homage, of sorts, to the right angle, which he calls ‘our environment’s most ubiquitous shape’ – were produced using the newly available technology of vacuum deposition, by which minutely thin films of metal are applied to glass surfaces. Their coatings turn the cubes into both windows and mirrors, giving an impression of depth and volume that alters in relation to the viewer’s position. ‘Charmed’ by the plating process, Bell bought his own equipment in 1969. His work since then has involved ongoing experimentation with the possibilities of the technique, resulting in series such as the ‘Vapour Drawings’ and ‘Mirage Works’ that he began making in 1978. Bell’s current exhibition at White Cube, London, includes a number of the ‘Light Knots’ that he has been making since 2013. Twists of vacuum-coated Mylar, these are presented suspended in transparent cubes mounted on white plinths: a return, of sorts, to the artist’s earliest efforts to render the immaterial (light, air) tactile and substantial, and a luminously beautiful demonstration of what he once called ‘the sensuality of vision’.

Amy Sherlock: You have been making art for over 40 years now and have been exploring a remarkably consistent set of themes – in relation to light, space and surface – through a very specific process – the vacuum coating of surfaces. The result is a body of work that’s both recognizable and diverse. How did that develop?

Larry Bell: I think the important thing is to keep the work as your teacher so that you’re always learning something it: follow the work and a whole other world will reveal itself. Over my career, I learned a whole bunch about the laws of physics. I was never particularly into science, but it turned out that one of the things that interested me was the strange kind of alchemy which comes with using industrial equipment for a very specific task. My work has taught me everything: all I know I learned in the studio. When I went to school I had a great teacher – several great teachers – but the main thing that they taught me was how to trust myself.

AS: You studied with Robert Irwin at Chouinard Art Institute (which became CalArts) in the late 1950s. What was that like?

LB: He was a fantastic guy. He was the most charismatic person I think I’ve ever met and he was very funny.

AS: Do you see any similarities between his work and your own?

LB: Not really. His is on a different wavelength. There’s a different pattern.

Larry Bell, ’2D-3D: Glass & Vapor’, 2015, London. Courtesy: the artist and White Cube

AS: Tell me about the new work in your current show at White Cube – the ‘Light Knots’, which you have been making for the past few years. In the last show you had with the gallery, in the Bermondsey space in 2013, they were hanging freely. I’m interested in the fact that this time they’re in cubes.

LB: Well, they’re in cases that have a very specific architecture, which is compelling to the eye because it’s not quite square. They’re bigger at the top than they are at the bottom. It’s a subtle thing: it catches your eye though you don’t really see it, you’re not aware of it as an issue. I like playing with that. I also like the idea that the sculptures have been captured. To me, when the ‘Light Knots’ are in containers, they’re three-dimensional drawings rather than sculptures: simply by putting them in a case, their whole presence has changed. When I hang them from the ceiling, they turn very slowly with the air currents. Your eye is stationary, yet the space that you are standing in is reflected off the surface of the knots, so it’s as though you are seeing it from different perspectives. When you look at them in a box, they’re frozen and you turn. You have to walk around for the reflections to change.

AS: The cubes change the way you engage with them. When I saw the show in Bermondsey, I found the ‘Light Knots’ quite playful – they looked like mobiles. At Mason’s Yard, the presentation is much more formal. The clear boxes make it look like a museological display, as though the knots were trapped butterflies.

LB: Yes, exactly.

AS: What are they made of?

LB: Mylar, a kind of polyester film. It’s not expensive and you can get it anywhere. It’s easy to work with: I take a square of it and cut it very quickly with a knife. I’m actually making a drawing – in most cases, it’s very much like the outline of a torso. I follow the line that goes from the head to the neck and shoulder, and then a make couple of other incisions, which might suggest an arm. Then I take a corner of the Mylar sheet, twist it through a cut and let gravity pull the knot until it can’t move any further. That’s the form.

AS: Have you ever worked with figurative elements before?

LB: No; not until I started playing with this stuff. After I’ve twisted the Mylar into shape, I place it in a machine that deposits metal or quartz films onto it. These coatings are exquisitely thin; they interfere with the light that strikes the surface but don’t change the form. I like to experiment with these things and I can do it fast. Right now in my life I am happy working with a flow that lets me get a lot of stuff done in a short amount of time. The faster I work, the less I think about it and the more intuition takes over. In my experience, improvisation, spontaneity and intuition are the most powerful tools that you can possibly work with.

AS: Are there new technological processes that you are interested in experimenting with?

LB: No. I’ve been working with the same techniques since the late 1960s and they’re no longer new. I’m a dinosaur in tech terms. When I first started working with vacuum film, it was all new – both the process itself and new to me. I purchased the thermal evaporator, which is the piece of equipment you need to for vacuum coating, because it was too expensive to send everything to someone else to fabricate. I could never get enough done: I couldn’t afford it. I managed to get enough money together to buy a used evaporator and learned the process. Eventually, I commissioned somebody to make me a big one. I ordered it in 1968, got it in 1969, and have been using it ever since.

‘Venice in Venice’, 2011, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artist and White Cube

AS: The finish it produces still looks incredibly fresh. I remember seeing your work in a show called ‘Venice in Venice’, which ran alongside the 2011 biennale. It was installed in a palazzo on the Dorsoduro and it looked radically contemporary in contrast to the crumbling, baroque surroundings.

LB: I actually wanted to destroy the piece in Venice. I didn’t like the way it looked.

AS: In that context?

LB: No: at all. I thought the patina it had acquired wasn’t right, somehow. I tried to have the piece destroyed but couldn’t because it wasn’t mine to destroy – somebody else owned it.

AS: Does that mean your work always has to look squeaky-clean-new?

LB: It doesn’t. What I learned from that experience is that everything on this earth has a right to a patina and to try to keep things squeaky-clean is impossible. Deep down, I already knew that to be true, but at the time of that Venice show, I didn’t see it.

AS: Something that has always struck me about your work is the way each piece looks perfect, flawless.

LB: Well, they seem that way, but each one is a lesson. I see the work not as art but as evidence of an activity, and that makes it a lot easier for me to function. There’s no good or bad: it’s just what you did. And it’s a continually evolving process.

AS: I wanted to ask about your work The Iceberg and its Shadow (1977), which I was reminded of by one of the panel pieces included in the show at White Cube – 6 × 8: An Improvisation (1994). The Iceberg… was perhaps your most ambitious piece in terms of scale – 56 sections of glass, which could be configured in an almost infinite number of ways. The title is one of my favourite ever for a work of art. Where is The Iceberg… now?

LB: It doesn’t exist. It was destroyed. It was bought by a collector in Connecticut and given to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where it was installed for a period of three years in different areas of the campus. And then it was put into boxes in storage and lost for 30 years. They found it when a new director came in, saw it listed on the inventory and realized that it hadn’t been on show for decades. But they couldn’t find it, because it wasn’t in the place where they store art. When they eventually tracked it down in some warehouse, it was all smashed up.

Larry Bell, ‘The Iceberg and Its Shadow’, 1974. Courtesy: the artist and White Cube

AS: The iceberg had melted.

LB: You know why I called it the iceberg? Because there were 56 parts to the piece and they all fit together in any configuration. The iceberg was 28 panels of clear glass and the shadow was exactly the same configuration but of grey glass. The number of possible combinations of the iceberg was the factor of 56, meaning that in any given show of the piece you were only seeing the very tip of it.

AS: Helen Pashgian, another great California light and space artist, has talked about her work as addressing ‘the space where air meets the water’. It’s a beautiful image, like the horizon: a meeting point between two expanses that you perceive but can never quite reach, or get a hold on. The idea of an iceberg and its shadow reminds me of that: something vast and substantial, but disappearing all the time. A kind of fickle solidity.

LB: Well, thank you. But it was actually not so mysterious – it was very specific, in the way that I just said. Though I always thought it was a good title, too.

Larry Bell lives and works between Taos and Los Angeles, USA. His work has been widely exhibited internationally. His solo exhibition, ‘2D–3D: Glass & Vapor’ runs at White Cube Mason’s Yard, London, UK until 26 September.

By Stephanie DeGooyer

A.L. Steiner, Untitled (from 'Puppies & Babies'), 2012, colour pigment print. All images courtesy: the artist, 3001 Gallery, and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, Deborah Schamoni, Munich, and Koenig & Clinton, New York

In her new memoir The Argonauts (2015), poet, writer and art critic Maggie Nelson mediates on a set of oxymorons: the pregnant woman who thinks, the mother who writes and the queer who procreates.

At a speaking engagement for her previous book, The Art of Cruelty (2011), a well-known playwright asks Nelson how, ‘in her condition’, she was able to deal with the book’s dark content. Returning to work after the birth of her son, a colleague reassures her that, eventually, she will get back to writing. And a friend reacts to a personalized mug in her cupboard featuring a pregnant Nelson with her stepson and her partner, artist Harry Dodge (who identifies as neither male nor female), dressed up to see the Nutcracker: ‘I’ve never seen anything so heteronormative in all my life.’

These are not only snapshots of Nelson’s life: they are negatives of a cultural binary that places mothering on the side of normativity, cordoning it off from the rigors of intellectualism, even in supposedly radical feminist and queer circles. Nelson recalls a seminar she once attended featuring feminist theorist Jane Gallop and art historian Rosalind Krauss. To make a point about the objectified status of the mother in Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1980), Gallop discussed photographs of herself naked in the bathtub with her baby son. Krauss’s response to this slideshow, as remembered by Nelson, was that Gallop’s ‘maternity had rotted her mind… contaminating serious academic space with her pudgy body and unresolved, self-involved thinking.’

Nelson is not engaging in feminist reversals. She is not speculating on the double standards and microaggressions that many women face when they open up about their reproductive lives. There are certainly plenty of men who have been applauded for their forays into the deep, dark domestic. (Nelson mentions philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s theory of the uterus as a ‘bubble’ that cradles the fetus before individualization in the world— ‘negative gynecology’ – but the immersive, autobiographical writing of Karl Ove Knausgaard also comes to mind). And there are many female writers and artists – Moyra Davey, Elena Ferrante, Mary Kelly and Mierle Laderman – whose work defies, and is celebrated for defying, the ban on maternity. (Though Kelly initially scandalized the public by bringing stained diaper liners into the ICA, London, in 1976 for her installation Post-Partum Document, and Davey’s 2001 anthology The Mother Reader, published with a social justice press, is seldom discussed in interviews about her photography or mentioned in her biography). The real genre-defying aspect of The Argonauts is its effort to engage questions about what it means to be immersed in the material conditions of one’s life and to subject that life to the operating table of language. In other words, it is a book about the performance of memoir. Or, as Nelson puts it in another context, she is ‘in drag’ as a memoirist.

The book is structured as an assemblage of anecdotes from Nelson’s life and references culled from her library. These notes sometimes amount to only a line or a small paragraph, but it is from within this compressed form that Nelson seeks to expand the aesthetic and cultural terminology–- especially the supposedly radical terminology— that categorizes the experience of all bodies and households. She asks questions about writing autobiography that most writers take for granted. How can she write about pregnancy, marriage, child and stepchild rearing without sneers of hetero- or homonormativity? How can she open up about life with her partner without betraying their love and intimacy? How can she even speak about her partner without assigning them a gender? (‘How to explain,’ she asks, ‘in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy?’) And what does it mean to write a book while latched to a breast-pumping machine?

‘Here’s the catch,’ says Nelson, ‘I cannot hold my baby at the same time as I write.’

A.L. Steiner’s installation Puppies and Babies, for which Nelson wrote an accompanying essay and mentions several times in The Argonauts, is in many ways the art world equivalent to Nelson’s memoir. In 2012, Steiner arranged a collage of private snapshots she had always thought of as ‘personal’, ‘cheesy’ and ‘unartistic’ – hence not part of her professional oeuvre– on the walls of 3001 Gallery in Los Angeles. Dogs and babies, the most reprehensible and lowbrow of photographic subjects, are seen nursing, walking, spooning and suckling with their caregivers. Arranged in a way that a pre-Instagram teenager might tack up photos of friends and family on the inside of a school locker, but with far more sexualized nudity (the work includes pregnant women in provocative poses, as well as children and parents naked together), Steiner’s collection undoes the distinction between the deviant, non-reproductive sexuality of, say, Robert Mapplethorpe or Nan Goldin’s photographs, and the joyful messiness of everyday caretaking. Steiner’s show, says Nelson, ‘reminds us…that nothing we do in this life need have a lid crammed on it, that no set of practices or relations has the monopoly on the so-called radical, or the so-called normative.’

At its core, The Argonauts wages a much-needed attack on what passes for radical thought and art in our times. But her book is more poetic than polemic. Nelson swerves away from academic language even as she pays homage to her favorite philosophers and teachers (‘I am not interested in a hermeneutics, or an erotics, or a metaphorics, of my anus. I am interested in ass-fucking’), and she has little patience for the grandiloquent, masculinist thinking of Žižek, Baudrillard and Badiou (‘let us leave them to their love, their event proper’). She is especially irked by the anti-natalism of queer theorists such as Lee Edelman, whose book No Future (2004) espouses queerness as a rejection of what he calls ‘reproductive futurity’, a ‘fuck you’ to the metaphorical Child in whose name the future is propagated. Edelman encourages queers to reject the conservative and homophobic illusion that ‘children are the future’, turn away from a society modeled on the family, and embrace the disruptive negativity of sexuality for its own sake. Nelson rightly questions the anti-social, even narcissistic, dimension of this thesis: ‘basking in the punk allure of ‘no future’ won’t suffice, either, as if all that is left for us to do is sit back and watch while the gratuitously wealthy and greedy shed our economy and our climate and our planet.’

What good (or bad), ultimately, does avoidance of reproduction do? We, of course, have more than enough reason to question the sustainability of the future, but to emphasize singleness and deviant sexuality as glamorously radical at the expense of fragility, dependence, care, disability – all of which are part of the experience of pregnancy and motherhood – is to banish the lives of many women from discussions of politics, progressive or otherwise. I remember once applauding John Waters when he said, during a performance in Ithaca, New York, that ‘being gay was not enough’ for radical action; and then feeling quietly ushered out of the building when he went on to declare heterosexual people without children as more ‘his people’ than lesbians with baby strollers. (And I once fretfully gave a talk for a job interview in front of Edelman with a tightly bandaged pregnant belly; the fear of being with child before the ‘fuck the Child’ theorist seems to throw the wrong kind of wrench at my future).

It is tempting, and in bad taste, to think of The Argonauts as some kind of alternative take on Helen Gurley Brown’s Having It All (1982). In the end, Nelson is not promoting an extension of duties for the mother, a right to be both art and body, or a right to be represented in the first place. There is no agenda here. There is no having it all. Instead of a binary between the mind and motherhood, sex and reproduction, the former is folded into a new state – one that Nelson calls exhaustion, in a positive sense. Exhaustion is a transitive state, a state of rest and repose between fighting and fucking, or failing to fuck and fight. It defines the shift from the insatiability of sexual desire to post-partum collapse. It is not the moment of giving up, though. Exhaustion, as Nelson figures it, involves acknowledging a dependence on the care of others. It is from an exhausted state, then, (The Argonauts was written in the year after the birth of her child) that Nelson invites her reader to encounter the fragility of her body, the body of her lover, and the body of her child, all the while redefining, or rather un-defining, what a memoir can be: ‘from my station of fatigue,’ says Nelson, ‘exchanging horniness for exhaustion grows in allure. Unable to fight my station, at least for the time being, I try to learn from it; another self, stripped.’

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson is published by Graywolf Press

By Stephanie DeGooyer

A.L. Steiner, Untitled (from 'Puppies & Babies'), 2012, colour pigment print. All images courtesy: the artist, 3001 Gallery, and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, Deborah Schamoni, Munich, and Koenig & Clinton, New York

In her new memoir The Argonauts (2015), poet, writer and art critic Maggie Nelson mediates on a set of oxymorons: the pregnant woman who thinks, the mother who writes and the queer who procreates.

At a speaking engagement for her previous book, The Art of Cruelty (2011), a well-known playwright asks Nelson how, ‘in her condition’, she was able to deal with the book’s dark content. Returning to work after the birth of her son, a colleague reassures her that, eventually, she will get back to writing. And a friend reacts to a personalized mug in her cupboard featuring a pregnant Nelson with her stepson and her partner, artist Harry Dodge (who identifies as neither male nor female), dressed up to see the Nutcracker: ‘I’ve never seen anything so heteronormative in all my life.’

These are not only snapshots of Nelson’s life: they are negatives of a cultural binary that places mothering on the side of normativity, cordoning it off from the rigors of intellectualism, even in supposedly radical feminist and queer circles. Nelson recalls a seminar she once attended featuring feminist theorist Jane Gallop and art historian Rosalind Krauss. To make a point about the objectified status of the mother in Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1980), Gallop discussed photographs of herself naked in the bathtub with her baby son. Krauss’s response to this slideshow, as remembered by Nelson, was that Gallop’s ‘maternity had rotted her mind… contaminating serious academic space with her pudgy body and unresolved, self-involved thinking.’

Nelson is not engaging in feminist reversals. She is not speculating on the double standards and microaggressions that many women face when they open up about their reproductive lives. There are certainly plenty of men who have been applauded for their forays into the deep, dark domestic. (Nelson mentions philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s theory of the uterus as a ‘bubble’ that cradles the fetus before individualization in the world— ‘negative gynecology’ – but the immersive, autobiographical writing of Karl Ove Knausgaard also comes to mind). And there are many female writers and artists – Moyra Davey, Elena Ferrante, Mary Kelly and Mierle Laderman – whose work defies, and is celebrated for defying, the ban on maternity. (Though Kelly initially scandalized the public by bringing stained diaper liners into the ICA, London, in 1976 for her installation Post-Partum Document, and Davey’s 2001 anthology The Mother Reader, published with a social justice press, is seldom discussed in interviews about her photography or mentioned in her biography). The real genre-defying aspect of The Argonauts is its effort to engage questions about what it means to be immersed in the material conditions of one’s life and to subject that life to the operating table of language. In other words, it is a book about the performance of memoir. Or, as Nelson puts it in another context, she is ‘in drag’ as a memoirist.

The book is structured as an assemblage of anecdotes from Nelson’s life and references culled from her library. These notes sometimes amount to only a line or a small paragraph, but it is from within this compressed form that Nelson seeks to expand the aesthetic and cultural terminology–- especially the supposedly radical terminology— that categorizes the experience of all bodies and households. She asks questions about writing autobiography that most writers take for granted. How can she write about pregnancy, marriage, child and stepchild rearing without sneers of hetero- or homonormativity? How can she open up about life with her partner without betraying their love and intimacy? How can she even speak about her partner without assigning them a gender? (‘How to explain,’ she asks, ‘in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy?’) And what does it mean to write a book while latched to a breast-pumping machine?

‘Here’s the catch,’ says Nelson, ‘I cannot hold my baby at the same time as I write.’

A.L. Steiner’s installation Puppies and Babies, for which Nelson wrote an accompanying essay and mentions several times in The Argonauts, is in many ways the art world equivalent to Nelson’s memoir. In 2012, Steiner arranged a collage of private snapshots she had always thought of as ‘personal’, ‘cheesy’ and ‘unartistic’ – hence not part of her professional oeuvre– on the walls of 3001 Gallery in Los Angeles. Dogs and babies, the most reprehensible and lowbrow of photographic subjects, are seen nursing, walking, spooning and suckling with their caregivers. Arranged in a way that a pre-Instagram teenager might tack up photos of friends and family on the inside of a school locker, but with far more sexualized nudity (the work includes pregnant women in provocative poses, as well as children and parents naked together), Steiner’s collection undoes the distinction between the deviant, non-reproductive sexuality of, say, Robert Mapplethorpe or Nan Goldin’s photographs, and the joyful messiness of everyday caretaking. Steiner’s show, says Nelson, ‘reminds us…that nothing we do in this life need have a lid crammed on it, that no set of practices or relations has the monopoly on the so-called radical, or the so-called normative.’

At its core, The Argonauts wages a much-needed attack on what passes for radical thought and art in our times. But her book is more poetic than polemic. Nelson swerves away from academic language even as she pays homage to her favorite philosophers and teachers (‘I am not interested in a hermeneutics, or an erotics, or a metaphorics, of my anus. I am interested in ass-fucking’), and she has little patience for the grandiloquent, masculinist thinking of Žižek, Baudrillard and Badiou (‘let us leave them to their love, their event proper’). She is especially irked by the anti-natalism of queer theorists such as Lee Edelman, whose book No Future (2004) espouses queerness as a rejection of what he calls ‘reproductive futurity’, a ‘fuck you’ to the metaphorical Child in whose name the future is propagated. Edelman encourages queers to reject the conservative and homophobic illusion that ‘children are the future’, turn away from a society modeled on the family, and embrace the disruptive negativity of sexuality for its own sake. Nelson rightly questions the anti-social, even narcissistic, dimension of this thesis: ‘basking in the punk allure of ‘no future’ won’t suffice, either, as if all that is left for us to do is sit back and watch while the gratuitously wealthy and greedy shed our economy and our climate and our planet.’

What good (or bad), ultimately, does avoidance of reproduction do? We, of course, have more than enough reason to question the sustainability of the future, but to emphasize singleness and deviant sexuality as glamorously radical at the expense of fragility, dependence, care, disability – all of which are part of the experience of pregnancy and motherhood – is to banish the lives of many women from discussions of politics, progressive or otherwise. I remember once applauding John Waters when he said, during a performance in Ithaca, New York, that ‘being gay was not enough’ for radical action; and then feeling quietly ushered out of the building when he went on to declare heterosexual people without children as more ‘his people’ than lesbians with baby strollers. (And I once fretfully gave a talk for a job interview in front of Edelman with a tightly bandaged pregnant belly; the fear of being with child before the ‘fuck the Child’ theorist seems to throw the wrong kind of wrench at my future).

It is tempting, and in bad taste, to think of The Argonauts as some kind of alternative take on Helen Gurley Brown’s Having It All (1982). In the end, Nelson is not promoting an extension of duties for the mother, a right to be both art and body, or a right to be represented in the first place. There is no agenda here. There is no having it all. Instead of a binary between the mind and motherhood, sex and reproduction, the former is folded into a new state – one that Nelson calls exhaustion, in a positive sense. Exhaustion is a transitive state, a state of rest and repose between fighting and fucking, or failing to fuck and fight. It defines the shift from the insatiability of sexual desire to post-partum collapse. It is not the moment of giving up, though. Exhaustion, as Nelson figures it, involves acknowledging a dependence on the care of others. It is from an exhausted state, then, (The Argonauts was written in the year after the birth of her child) that Nelson invites her reader to encounter the fragility of her body, the body of her lover, and the body of her child, all the while redefining, or rather un-defining, what a memoir can be: ‘from my station of fatigue,’ says Nelson, ‘exchanging horniness for exhaustion grows in allure. Unable to fight my station, at least for the time being, I try to learn from it; another self, stripped.’

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson is published by Graywolf Press

By Stephanie DeGooyer

A.L. Steiner, Untitled (from 'Puppies & Babies'), 2012, colour pigment print. All images courtesy: the artist and Koenig & Clinton, New York

In her new memoir The Argonauts (2015), poet, writer and art critic Maggie Nelson meditates on a set of oxymorons: the pregnant woman who thinks, the mother who writes and the queer who procreates.

At a speaking engagement for her previous book, The Art of Cruelty (2011), a well-known playwright asks Nelson how, ‘in her condition’, she was able to deal with the book’s dark content. Returning to work after the birth of her son, a colleague reassures her that, eventually, she will get back to writing. And a friend reacts to a personalized mug in her cupboard featuring a pregnant Nelson with her stepson and her partner, artist Harry Dodge (who identifies as neither male nor female), dressed up to see the Nutcracker: ‘I’ve never seen anything so heteronormative in all my life.’

These are not only snapshots of Nelson’s life: they are negatives of a cultural binary that places mothering on the side of normativity, cordoning it off from the rigors of intellectualism, even in supposedly radical feminist and queer circles. Nelson recalls a seminar she once attended featuring feminist theorist Jane Gallop and art historian Rosalind Krauss. To make a point about the objectified status of the mother in Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1980), Gallop discussed photographs of herself naked in the bathtub with her baby son. Krauss’s response to this slideshow, as remembered by Nelson, was that Gallop’s ‘maternity had rotted her mind… contaminating serious academic space with her pudgy body and unresolved, self-involved thinking.’

Nelson is not engaging in feminist reversals. She is not speculating on the double standards and microaggressions that many women face when they open up about their reproductive lives. There are certainly plenty of men who have been applauded for their forays into the deep, dark domestic. (Nelson mentions philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s theory of the uterus as a ‘bubble’ that cradles the fetus before individualization in the world— ‘negative gynecology’ – but the immersive, autobiographical writing of Karl Ove Knausgaard also comes to mind). And there are many female writers and artists – Moyra Davey, Elena Ferrante, Mary Kelly and Mierle Laderman – whose work defies, and is celebrated for defying, the ban on maternity. (Though Kelly initially scandalized the public by bringing stained diaper liners into the ICA, London, in 1976 for her installation Post-Partum Document, and Davey’s 2001 anthology The Mother Reader, published with a social justice press, is seldom discussed in interviews about her photography or mentioned in her biography). The real genre-defying aspect of The Argonauts is its effort to engage questions about what it means to be immersed in the material conditions of one’s life and to subject that life to the operating table of language. In other words, it is a book about the performance of memoir. Or, as Nelson puts it in another context, she is ‘in drag’ as a memoirist.

The book is structured as an assemblage of anecdotes from Nelson’s life and references culled from her library. These notes sometimes amount to only a line or a small paragraph, but it is from within this compressed form that Nelson seeks to expand the aesthetic and cultural terminology–- especially the supposedly radical terminology— that categorizes the experience of all bodies and households. She asks questions about writing autobiography that most writers take for granted. How can she write about pregnancy, marriage, child and stepchild rearing without sneers of hetero- or homonormativity? How can she open up about life with her partner without betraying their love and intimacy? How can she even speak about her partner without assigning them a gender? (‘How to explain,’ she asks, ‘in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy?’) And what does it mean to write a book while latched to a breast-pumping machine?

‘Here’s the catch,’ says Nelson, ‘I cannot hold my baby at the same time as I write.’

A.L. Steiner’s installation Puppies and Babies, for which Nelson wrote an accompanying essay and mentions several times in The Argonauts, is in many ways the art world equivalent to Nelson’s memoir. In 2012, Steiner arranged a collage of private snapshots she had always thought of as ‘personal’, ‘cheesy’ and ‘unartistic’ – hence not part of her professional oeuvre– on the walls of 3001 Gallery in Los Angeles. Dogs and babies, the most reprehensible and lowbrow of photographic subjects, are seen nursing, walking, spooning and suckling with their caregivers. Arranged in a way that a pre-Instagram teenager might tack up photos of friends and family on the inside of a school locker, but with far more sexualized nudity (the work includes pregnant women in provocative poses, as well as children and parents naked together), Steiner’s collection undoes the distinction between the deviant, non-reproductive sexuality of, say, Robert Mapplethorpe or Nan Goldin’s photographs, and the joyful messiness of everyday caretaking. Steiner’s show, says Nelson, ‘reminds us…that nothing we do in this life need have a lid crammed on it, that no set of practices or relations has the monopoly on the so-called radical, or the so-called normative.’

At its core, The Argonauts wages a much-needed attack on what passes for radical thought and art in our times. But her book is more poetic than polemic. Nelson swerves away from academic language even as she pays homage to her favorite philosophers and teachers (‘I am not interested in a hermeneutics, or an erotics, or a metaphorics, of my anus. I am interested in ass-fucking’), and she has little patience for the grandiloquent, masculinist thinking of Žižek, Baudrillard and Badiou (‘let us leave them to their love, their event proper’). She is especially irked by the anti-natalism of queer theorists such as Lee Edelman, whose book No Future (2004) espouses queerness as a rejection of what he calls ‘reproductive futurity’, a ‘fuck you’ to the metaphorical Child in whose name the future is propagated. Edelman encourages queers to reject the conservative and homophobic illusion that ‘children are the future’, turn away from a society modeled on the family, and embrace the disruptive negativity of sexuality for its own sake. Nelson rightly questions the anti-social, even narcissistic, dimension of this thesis: ‘basking in the punk allure of ‘no future’ won’t suffice, either, as if all that is left for us to do is sit back and watch while the gratuitously wealthy and greedy shed our economy and our climate and our planet.’

What good (or bad), ultimately, does avoidance of reproduction do? We, of course, have more than enough reason to question the sustainability of the future, but to emphasize singleness and deviant sexuality as glamorously radical at the expense of fragility, dependence, care, disability – all of which are part of the experience of pregnancy and motherhood – is to banish the lives of many women from discussions of politics, progressive or otherwise. I remember once applauding John Waters when he said, during a performance in Ithaca, New York, that ‘being gay was not enough’ for radical action; and then feeling quietly ushered out of the building when he went on to declare heterosexual people without children as more ‘his people’ than lesbians with baby strollers. (And I once fretfully gave a talk for a job interview in front of Edelman with a tightly bandaged pregnant belly; the fear of being with child before the ‘fuck the Child’ theorist seems to throw the wrong kind of wrench at my future).

It is tempting, and in bad taste, to think of The Argonauts as some kind of alternative take on Helen Gurley Brown’s Having It All (1982). In the end, Nelson is not promoting an extension of duties for the mother, a right to be both art and body, or a right to be represented in the first place. There is no agenda here. There is no having it all. Instead of a binary between the mind and motherhood, sex and reproduction, the former is folded into a new state – one that Nelson calls exhaustion, in a positive sense. Exhaustion is a transitive state, a state of rest and repose between fighting and fucking, or failing to fuck and fight. It defines the shift from the insatiability of sexual desire to post-partum collapse. It is not the moment of giving up, though. Exhaustion, as Nelson figures it, involves acknowledging a dependence on the care of others. It is from an exhausted state, then, (The Argonauts was written in the year after the birth of her child) that Nelson invites her reader to encounter the fragility of her body, the body of her lover, and the body of her child, all the while redefining, or rather un-defining, what a memoir can be: ‘from my station of fatigue,’ says Nelson, ‘exchanging horniness for exhaustion grows in allure. Unable to fight my station, at least for the time being, I try to learn from it; another self, stripped.’

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson is published by Graywolf Press

By Stephanie DeGooyer

A.L. Steiner, Untitled (Rachel on bed with Pocket and Goose), 2011, colour pigment print. All images courtesy: the artist and Koenig & Clinton, New York

In her new memoir The Argonauts (2015), poet, writer and art critic Maggie Nelson meditates on a set of oxymorons: the pregnant woman who thinks, the mother who writes and the queer who procreates.

At a speaking engagement for her previous book, The Art of Cruelty (2011), a well-known playwright asks Nelson how, ‘in her condition’, she was able to deal with the book’s dark content. Returning to work after the birth of her son, a colleague reassures her that, eventually, she will get back to writing. And a friend reacts to a personalized mug in her cupboard featuring a pregnant Nelson with her stepson and her partner, artist Harry Dodge (who identifies as neither male nor female), dressed up to see the Nutcracker: ‘I’ve never seen anything so heteronormative in all my life.’

These are not only snapshots of Nelson’s life: they are negatives of a cultural binary that places mothering on the side of normativity, cordoning it off from the rigors of intellectualism, even in supposedly radical feminist and queer circles. Nelson recalls a seminar she once attended featuring feminist theorist Jane Gallop and art historian Rosalind Krauss. To make a point about the objectified status of the mother in Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1980), Gallop discussed photographs of herself naked in the bathtub with her baby son. Krauss’s response to this slideshow, as remembered by Nelson, was that Gallop’s ‘maternity had rotted her mind… contaminating serious academic space with her pudgy body and unresolved, self-involved thinking.’

Nelson is not engaging in feminist reversals. She is not speculating on the double standards and microaggressions that many women face when they open up about their reproductive lives. There are certainly plenty of men who have been applauded for their forays into the deep, dark domestic. (Nelson mentions philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s theory of the uterus as a ‘bubble’ that cradles the fetus before individualization in the world— ‘negative gynecology’ – but the immersive, autobiographical writing of Karl Ove Knausgaard also comes to mind). And there are many female writers and artists – Moyra Davey, Elena Ferrante, Mary Kelly and Mierle Laderman – whose work defies, and is celebrated for defying, the ban on maternity. (Though Kelly initially scandalized the public by bringing stained diaper liners into the ICA, London, in 1976 for her installation Post-Partum Document, and Davey’s 2001 anthology The Mother Reader, published with a social justice press, is seldom discussed in interviews about her photography or mentioned in her biography). The real genre-defying aspect of The Argonauts is its effort to engage questions about what it means to be immersed in the material conditions of one’s life and to subject that life to the operating table of language. In other words, it is a book about the performance of memoir. Or, as Nelson puts it in another context, she is ‘in drag’ as a memoirist.

The book is structured as an assemblage of anecdotes from Nelson’s life and references culled from her library. These notes sometimes amount to only a line or a small paragraph, but it is from within this compressed form that Nelson seeks to expand the aesthetic and cultural terminology–- especially the supposedly radical terminology— that categorizes the experience of all bodies and households. She asks questions about writing autobiography that most writers take for granted. How can she write about pregnancy, marriage, child and stepchild rearing without sneers of hetero- or homonormativity? How can she open up about life with her partner without betraying their love and intimacy? How can she even speak about her partner without assigning them a gender? (‘How to explain,’ she asks, ‘in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy?’) And what does it mean to write a book while latched to a breast-pumping machine?

‘Here’s the catch,’ says Nelson, ‘I cannot hold my baby at the same time as I write.’

A.L. Steiner’s installation Puppies and Babies, for which Nelson wrote an accompanying essay and mentions several times in The Argonauts, is in many ways the art world equivalent to Nelson’s memoir. In 2012, Steiner arranged a collage of private snapshots she had always thought of as ‘personal’, ‘cheesy’ and ‘unartistic’ – hence not part of her professional oeuvre– on the walls of 3001 Gallery in Los Angeles. Dogs and babies, the most reprehensible and lowbrow of photographic subjects, are seen nursing, walking, spooning and suckling with their caregivers. Arranged in a way that a pre-Instagram teenager might tack up photos of friends and family on the inside of a school locker, but with far more sexualized nudity (the work includes pregnant women in provocative poses, as well as children and parents naked together), Steiner’s collection undoes the distinction between the deviant, non-reproductive sexuality of, say, Robert Mapplethorpe or Nan Goldin’s photographs, and the joyful messiness of everyday caretaking. Steiner’s show, says Nelson, ‘reminds us…that nothing we do in this life need have a lid crammed on it, that no set of practices or relations has the monopoly on the so-called radical, or the so-called normative.’

At its core, The Argonauts wages a much-needed attack on what passes for radical thought and art in our times. But her book is more poetic than polemic. Nelson swerves away from academic language even as she pays homage to her favorite philosophers and teachers (‘I am not interested in a hermeneutics, or an erotics, or a metaphorics, of my anus. I am interested in ass-fucking’), and she has little patience for the grandiloquent, masculinist thinking of Žižek, Baudrillard and Badiou (‘let us leave them to their love, their event proper’). She is especially irked by the anti-natalism of queer theorists such as Lee Edelman, whose book No Future (2004) espouses queerness as a rejection of what he calls ‘reproductive futurity’, a ‘fuck you’ to the metaphorical Child in whose name the future is propagated. Edelman encourages queers to reject the conservative and homophobic illusion that ‘children are the future’, turn away from a society modeled on the family, and embrace the disruptive negativity of sexuality for its own sake. Nelson rightly questions the anti-social, even narcissistic, dimension of this thesis: ‘basking in the punk allure of ‘no future’ won’t suffice, either, as if all that is left for us to do is sit back and watch while the gratuitously wealthy and greedy shed our economy and our climate and our planet.’

What good (or bad), ultimately, does avoidance of reproduction do? We, of course, have more than enough reason to question the sustainability of the future, but to emphasize singleness and deviant sexuality as glamorously radical at the expense of fragility, dependence, care, disability – all of which are part of the experience of pregnancy and motherhood – is to banish the lives of many women from discussions of politics, progressive or otherwise. I remember once applauding John Waters when he said, during a performance in Ithaca, New York, that ‘being gay was not enough’ for radical action; and then feeling quietly ushered out of the building when he went on to declare heterosexual people without children as more ‘his people’ than lesbians with baby strollers. (And I once fretfully gave a talk for a job interview in front of Edelman with a tightly bandaged pregnant belly; the fear of being with child before the ‘fuck the Child’ theorist seems to throw the wrong kind of wrench at my future).

It is tempting, and in bad taste, to think of The Argonauts as some kind of alternative take on Helen Gurley Brown’s Having It All (1982). In the end, Nelson is not promoting an extension of duties for the mother, a right to be both art and body, or a right to be represented in the first place. There is no agenda here. There is no having it all. Instead of a binary between the mind and motherhood, sex and reproduction, the former is folded into a new state – one that Nelson calls exhaustion, in a positive sense. Exhaustion is a transitive state, a state of rest and repose between fighting and fucking, or failing to fuck and fight. It defines the shift from the insatiability of sexual desire to post-partum collapse. It is not the moment of giving up, though. Exhaustion, as Nelson figures it, involves acknowledging a dependence on the care of others. It is from an exhausted state, then, (The Argonauts was written in the year after the birth of her child) that Nelson invites her reader to encounter the fragility of her body, the body of her lover, and the body of her child, all the while redefining, or rather un-defining, what a memoir can be: ‘from my station of fatigue,’ says Nelson, ‘exchanging horniness for exhaustion grows in allure. Unable to fight my station, at least for the time being, I try to learn from it; another self, stripped.’

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson is published by Graywolf Press

By Noemi Smolik

Main Trade Fair Building, Nizhny Novgorod, built 1890.

When the invitation arrived this spring to attend a symposium in Nizhny Novgorod, I immediately said yes. I had always wanted to see this Russian city, which, at the end of the 19th century, witnessed one of the biggest scandals in the history of Russian art.  At the time, the city was one of the most important international trade centres. It hosted an annual fair attended by up to a million international visitors, accompanied by exhibitions of contemporary Russian art.

And so it was the case in 1896. As every year, artists were called to submit paintings to a jury. Michail Alexandrovič Vrubel (1856–1910), a painter still unknown at that time, supplied his pictures. Outraged, the jury declined: what was this artist thinking? Didn’t he know that his paintings were adopting elements of the primitive Russian icon painting tradition, while ignoring the modern central perspective, thus potentially damaging Russia’s reputation as a forward-looking, progressive nation?! What a disgrace!

Mikhail Vrubel, Portrait of Savva Mamontov (1897)

How flabbergasted the jury must have been, when, for the opening of the International Trade Fair, Vrubel’s painting were prominently put on display right next to the fair’s entrance, in a dedicated pavilion paid for by the industrialist and millionaire Savva Mamontov. A huge outcry in the press ensued, and one of the loudest voices belonged to Maxim Gorky (1868–1936), later to become the world-famous writer. For Gorky, Vrubel’s paintings heralded nothing less than the decline of Russian culture. To paint following the icon tradition instead of adopting the latest trends from Paris – the French-speaking ladies of the Russian bourgeoisie, following Gorky’s lead, could be overheard saying – clearly showed that the painter in question must be a mad man.

Today we know that Vrubel actually anticipated the Russian avant-garde of the 20th century. As the painter Mikhail Larionov (1881-1964) once pointed out, Vrubel was more important for him than Paul Cézanne. And artist Naum Gabo (1890-1977) even argued that the Suprematists, counter to what Western art historians usually argue, were not predominantly influenced by Western Cubism but by Russian icons – and Vrubel.

Yet, when Vrubel died in 1910, the only proper public exhibition he had had was the one in Nizhny Novgorod. That he had survived as a painter was almost solely thanks to his patron Mamontov. Ever since I knew this story I had wanted to visit the city 400 kilometres east of Moscow: the scandalous birth-place of the Russian avant-garde.

I land at an airport resembling a shed. Picked up by the friendly Elena Belova, curator of the city’s National Centre for Contemporary Art hosting the symposium. Proudly she tells me that she’ll bring me to a hotel on the hills offering the best view over the city. And indeed, after a slow car ride on congested roads through the busy city centre, I arrive at this place still emitting late-Soviet charm, with a view to the old fair building on the other side of river Oka (Nizhny Novgorod is situated at the confluence of Oka and Volga).

The next day the symposium starts. First the guests are shown around the Centre for Contemporary Art, housed in the restored armoury buildings of the city’s kremlin. The Centre’s opening to the public is the actual occasion for the symposium. Director Anna Gor welcomes us enthusiastically. Proudly she shows us around the spaces, before handing over to the young curator of the inaugural exhibition, Alisa Savitskaja. She starts explaining the show’s title, ‘High Hopes Museum’ – a title which immediately for me invokes the story of this fascinating city.

Nizhny Novgorod, meaning Lower New Town, was founded in 1221. With its many old monasteries and churches it is amongst the oldest cities of Russia. Thanks to the trade fair, in the 19th century, the city enjoyed its heyday. Theatres, opera houses, schools, hospitals, banks and trade buildings sprung up like mushrooms. Important figures such as Gorky, the mathematician Nikolai Lobachevskij (1792–1856) or avant-garde artist Mikhail Matyushin (1877–1913) were born here. In 1932 the city was renamed Gorky – still during the writer’s lifetime! – and while the trade fair was closed, the buildings later housed key elements of the Soviet arms industry. For most of the Soviet era Gorky was declared a ‘forbidden city’ – foreigners were not permitted. Dissident and Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989), after his 1980 protest against the Afghanistan war, was banished to Gorky.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the city, having re-adopted its original name, is in search of a new identity. The oppositional politician Boris Nemtsov, murdered right in front of Moscow’s Kremlin on 27 February this year, had been the region’s Governor in the early 1990s. Under his reign, the city had been at the forefront of ‘free market’ reform, resulting, initially, in significant economic growth for the region.

Centre for Contemporary Art, Nizhny Novgorod, installation view

The exhibition as well is dedicated to the idea of a search for identity. Contemporary artists from the region relate their work to important historical figures from the city. Elena Elagina and Igor Makarevich for example introduce us to Russia’s first female physician, the gynaecologist Nadezhda Suslova (1843–1918) who had her practice in the city. Evgenij Strelkov, together with other artists, built a complex installation in honour of all the city’s inventors in the field of media technology – Nizhny Novgorod was were Russia’s first ever telephone connection was installed. And the young artist Artem Filatov, with his installation made of rotten, wooden blanks, addressed the problem of all the old, wonderful wooden apartment houses, once the pride of the city, many of which, not having been maintained properly for decades, are now torn down. The exhibition brings together contemporary works with applied and folklore art, scientific artefacts and other documents – a smart as well as visually impressive combination.

Afterwards, the symposium entitled ‘Contemporary Art and Local Contexts’ gets under way. Catherine de Zegher, curator of the last Moscow Biennial, gives a talk, as well as Georg Schöllhammer, who together with his partner Hedwig Saxenhuber prepares the first Kyiv Biennial. Jara Boubnova, new Director of Sofia’s Institute of Contemporary Art, talks about the constant repainting of the Bulgarian capital’s Monument to the Soviet Army, with the relief of heroic soldiers being redesigned as Superman, Captain America, or Santa Claus – an expression of vandalism as much as of vernacular creativity. Other presentations report from the Russian cities of Krasnojarsk and Samara, alluding to the current, difficult situation Russian society going through – but no-one dares to openly address the issues. A level of underlying fear is undeniable. Impressive was also the account of Andreas Hoffmann, who in Kirkenes, the town in Northern Norway on the border to Russia, regularly organises art festivals in the bone-chilling cold of the polar February, inviting and involving Russian inhabitants from across the border.

During the symposium I get to know Kyrill Agafonov, a young artist with an iPad under his arm, whom together with artist Natasha Peredvigina forms the group Gorod Ustinov, specialized in what they call ‘Micro Art’; miniature objects, thought of in contrast to what they perceive to be the gigantomania of their home country. With their ‘Micro Art’, they participated in the last Moscow Biennial, and are now invited to Ghent, Belgium, their first trip abroad. Kirill actually lives in the city of Izhevsk, and for him, Nizhny Novgorod is the next big town, ‘just’ a mere 14 hours train ride away. During the symposium Kirill creates an installation consisting of small sculptures made of empty gun shells – of course, a commentary on the increasing militarization of Russian society.

Bugrov Homeless Shelter, Nizhny Novgorod

The next day, Kirill shows me around the city. We meet at the hotel, it rains and it’s cold. But we make our tour anyway. The city is on the move, everywhere are construction sites and renovations are under way, postmodern highrises next to old wooden houses, which, though they look like they would collapse any moment, are actually still inhabited. Prada and Gucci on one side of the street, dilapidation and poverty on the other. We see a surprising amount of old churches, some of which have been restored while others are still in ruins. I’m impressed by the many functionalist 1920s buildings, most of which however are in bad condition.

Finally, we stand in front of Kashirin House, the wooden house in which Gorky spent his childhood. It belonged to his grand father and can be visited. Proudly one of the ladies running the place points out a historic black and white photograph on the wall: a group portrait of serious-looking notables – the city parliament of which Gorky’s grand father was a member. The supposed proletarian origins, according to Soviet lore, of the great writer? There are several Gorky museums in the city, one of which still today shows huge paintings of the man with Stalin, as well as depictions of the Bugrov Homeless Shelter, the place that inspired him to write The Lower Depths (1902), the play that propelled him to worldwide fame.

Pechersky Ascension Monastery, Nizhny Novgorod

Together with Kirill I also visit the Pechersky Ascension Monastery holding the oldest known Russian chronicle. Everything is tip-top there, the lawn is impeccably kept – the Russian-Orthodox Church seems prosperous these days, something that can’t be said of the suburban surroundings of the monastery. Back in the city centre we meet the photographer Vladislav Efimov, and Artem Filatov, a lank 24 year-old artist with his hood firmly drawn over his head. He was born in the old part of town of which he is very fond. Together with other artist, including Kirill, his artistic interventions are geared towards raising awareness of the chaotic demolishing of old and the even more haphazard construction of new buildings. It’s hard to tell whether these interventions amount to merely pointing out things, making them prettier, or sometimes simply vandalism. In any case they call it street art, and show me a huge mural they made on the side of a derelict house, as well as a micro installation that Kirill has mounted neatly into a house’s lengthy crack in the wood.

In the evening I meet Sergej Provorov and Galina Myznikova, whom, known under their moniker Provmyza, are the most well-known artists in town. Their videos have been shown at the Russian Pavilion during the Venice Biennale in 2005, and at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The pieces deal with ideas of endurance, perseverance, the overcoming of powers – all of which are virtues that can be very useful especially in the current Russian society. I’m particularly impressed by their 2006 work inspired by Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters (1901): it shows three girls whom, standing at an abyss, frantically try to keep their balance.

I have one more day. Elena brings me to post-constructivist housing blocks which had been built as part of a master-plan to build the ideal city, the earliest examples of which stem from the late 1920s and still are modest, functional multi-storey houses. But as years went by, the buildings became more and more monumental, with neo-classicist column entrances to Stalin’s taste. The internationally connected music producer Alexander Yuminov lives in one of these buildings. With admirable passion, he records and documents the rich tradition of chants and folk songs from the wider region – he plays some fascinating examples of Udmurt folk music to me. But time is running out, as Elena still wants to bring me to gallery Tolk, the only commercial art space in town.

Tolk Gallery, Nizhny Novgorod, installation view with works by Toy Crew

Tolk represents some of the artists active in Nizhny Novgorod, including Artem Filatov. They are showing ten pictures by Eror und Seva, two young graffiti artists working under the name ‘Toy Crew’. Their exhibition is entitled ‘What is good and what is bad?’ (a line from a poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky), and their deadpan, smartly ‘naïve’ answers are 5 ‘bad’ and 5 ‘good’ paintings on unstretched canvasses, of people doing simple things such as feeding pigeons, or flushing them.

It’s dark by now, but I still have one big wish: to see the fair building up close where Vrubel once showed his paintings. The grand building is refurbished and lit from all sides. Elena makes a snapshot of me, and we go for a last glass of wine, and after a short night’s sleep, at six in the morning, I’m brought back to the airport.

By Eleanor Ivory Weber

Kate Meakin, a crust of bread, 2015, steel, tape, rabbit fur. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Christo Crocker

Locals revel in sardonically reminding outsiders who mention the infamous unpredictable weather: ‘that’s Melbourne’. Melburnians are proud of their city – it’s tempting to say there is an inward-looking tendency. However, more generously, it’s conviction and dedication to their place that’s perhaps less observable in more chaotic or unplanned cities. ‘It’s hard to leave Melbourne, you know’, I was warned by artist Sarah Rodigari, who lived there for ten years before returning to Sydney on foot on a six-week, 880 kilometre journey, ‘Strategies for leaving and arriving home’ (2011).

Melbourne – which is the capital of the Australian state, Victoria – has been deemed the world’s ‘most liveable city’ by The Economist Intelligence Unit five years in a row now. This perhaps explains the lure of the place, though strangely eight of the top 10 on this ‘liveable’ list last year were British colonies, or ‘Britain’s former dominions’ as The Economist magazine put it. It’s notable that the head of state in Australia, Canada and New Zealand remains Queen Elizabeth II, and that the English language is not native to any of these lands, which begs the question: liveable for who?

The decolonizing processes initiated by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s Labor government in the 1970s – that included Aboriginal Land Rights, replacement of the British honours system with the Order of Australia, and the creation of the Australia Council for the Arts – have since been progressively eroded.The right-wing government of the recently deposed Prime Minister Tony Abbott reintroduced knighthoods and cut federal funding for services to Indigenous communities, handing this responsibility over to the states and territories. This facilitated the Western Australian government’s decision earlier this year to close remote Aboriginal communities (which are, not incidentally, mining hotspots). His government also took over AU$100 million from the Australia Council budget to create the National Program for Excellence in the Arts, whose procedure for assessment is at the discretion of the Minister’s office (I direct you to the online, collectively authored artist project npea.org.au for more information). It remains to be seen how the new Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull’s approach will differ, and whether his supposed love for the arts is sincere or simply in line with his self-image as cultivated and charming – his primary point of departure from Abbott.

Still today, the majority of migrants to Melbourne (and Australia) are born in the UK, a rich Western democracy. Meanwhile, the federal government’s asylum seeker policy means people from troubled Asian and Middle Eastern countries, such as Afghanistan, are put in indefinite offshore detention on island-nations like Nauru, east of Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific Ocean. The conditions at the detention-centres contravene international human rights, yet these crimes are met with impunity (see The Saturday Paper, 22 August 2015: ‘Nauru rapes: “there is a war on women”’). On Friday 28 August 2015, a spontaneous rally erupted in Melbourne CBD within one hour of the announcement of ‘Operation Fortitude’, a plan by the new Australian Border Force (ABF) intended to commence that evening. ABF were to patrol the city to check visas, targeting those suspected of overstaying or of anti-social behaviour. With almost no information provided as to what grounds people would be stopped and checked, many could only assume that it would be via racial, ethnic and religious profiling. The terrifying thought of hundreds of police, state officers and federal border forces swarming the city generated outcry from Melburnians, and the protest resulted in the operation’s cancellation.

Cutting across traditional lands of the Kulin nation, Melbourne’s local identity, as with all cities in Australia, is not straightforward. In this free-settled town, many Aboriginals were killed or died of imported illness in the 19th century, and waves of migration from Europe and Asia have further complexified things. The question of who is ‘foreign’ in Australia is a loaded one.

Lachlan Petras’s recent solo show ‘Gala Day’, held at West Space, captured some of the questions of culture, ethnicity, origin and race that weave through this country. The installation was loosely modelled on a sports club, with deep red carpet underfoot. One of two box Pivotelli’s suspended from the roof corners featured rolling text describing the story of Serbian-Australian former National Soccer League player Bobby Despotovski. During a match in 2001 he gave his predominantly Croatian-Australian opponents the three finger victory salute (used by Serbian soldiers in the Balkan wars). The second TV showed footage of this year’s ‘Sports Without Borders’ conference, where the artist asked a question and filmed the response of former Australian Football League (AFL) star Dermott Brereton about racist language in the media. The ex-footballer has forged a successful career as a commentator, only apologising in 2011 for racially taunting an Aboriginal opponent, Chris Lewis, 20 years earlier. Petras’s timing was spot on; in recent months the debate on institutionalized racism in AFL has intensified around indigenous player and 2014 Australian of the Year, Adam Goodes, who called out a racist slur made towards him in 2013 and has since been consistently booed during games.

Petras implicates himself via paraphernalia displayed in a concrete vitrine positioned in the centre of the gallery: two jerseys, ‘Petras’ and ‘Despotovski’, incorporate a logo designed for the exhibition. Souvenirs, a newspaper clipping, team photographs, identity documents written in Cyrillic from his days playing at Despotovski’s former club in Belgrade, with the artist in soccer uniform throughout, all find themselves arranged as artefacts or memorabilia. These documents’ veracity is left to hang in the air, unresolved but potent.

West Space is known for its support of younger and experimental practices through a combination open-call and curated program of exhibitions, events, publications and lectures – Danny Butt and Rachel O’Reilly’s recently presented paper ‘Indentured aesthetic autonomy on the professional frontier’ is excellent and worth looking up. Recently, artist Georgina Criddle took over one of the galleries for a period of twelve weeks. Her durational and site-sensitive project ‘Before too long’ unfolds in the physical exhibition space as well as online via a newsletter: before-too-long.com

Artist-Run Initiatives (ARIs) play a vital role in providing opportunities for artists to exhibit, receive feedback, understand their practice and build community. Mostly run by volunteers, many ARIs charge exhibition fees to cover their building rent. In response to the increasing costs of showing work, many Melbourne artists have been self-organising in domestic or non-conventional art spaces.

In August, artist Adam John Cullen hosted a one-day group show in his suburban corner house, Kia Ora (which literally means ‘be well/happy’ or ‘hi’ in Maori language). Works replaced coffee tables, tablecloths, outdoor wall features and hen feeders. In the garden, Noriko Nakamura’s brilliant ‘interactive’ piece, a totem-like rooster carved into limestone, incorporated recesses filled with feed to encourage the house hens to eat from the sculpture – which they did. The very same day, Zac Segbedzi hosted a show in his one-bedroom, 24th floor apartment in the CBD. Titled ‘Death Box 24’, the tone was markedly different.

Segbedzi’s own video featured a scythe-bearing Death marching down Melbourne streets in broad daylight, past shops and consumers, mashed up with footage of internal organs being violently shaken amongst an array of colour. Natasha Havir Smith’s large patchwork satin piece hung from the corner of the open window, draping extravagantly out onto the floor, evoking a curtain implicated in a dramatic suicide. Lewis Fidock’s moulding concrete puppy moping at foot-level suggested an entropy also found in Liam Osborne’s window installation of twine, rusting metal and small empty sanitiser sachets, clinging to the glass with suction caps.

Artists Isabelle Sully and Simon McGlinn initiated the roaming curatorial project Salon, which organizes exhibitions in various non-gallery locations, recently showing works by Luigi Fusinato in a barrister’s office in the CBD. Pansy is an intermittent project space run out of the suburban home of artists Lauren Burrow and David Egan, with the latest show hosting band Human Pesticide. Punk Café, a small gallery attached to a studio complex, opened earlier this year. Kate Meakin’s recent solo show there, ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’, expanded on the artist’s interest in textiles and low-lying floor compositions. The predominant palette of white and grey unified the group of sculptural assemblages, drawing together their incongruous materials: steel, tape and rabbit fur (a crust of bread), steel dish racks and cow horn bangles (score), and cinderella (all 2015), whose moulded plaster over an umbrella frame, resting on two thin pieces of polystyrene, curved up from the floor like a breast.

Operating nomadically, Matthew Linde’s Centre for Style is a good example of an independent space that works to place Melbourne art and fashion in a broader context, not only showing the work of his peers to audiences in Europe and the States but, more importantly, putting international artists in an Australian context.

The scene described above does seem to be highly focused around sculpture, painting and installation, and domestic or semi-private settings do beg the question of accessibility and diversity. Yet these young artists seem to know only too well their audience and purpose: first of all their community of peers, then sharing documentation via online platforms and, thirdly, another line on the CV. More broadly speaking, progressive public arts festivals such as Dance Massive, Next Wave, Channels and Liquid Architecture are notable for producing new work and supporting local talent alongside interstate and international peers.

A highlight of the recent Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) was Karrabing Film Collective’s two short films, When the Dogs Talked (2014) and Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$ (2015). Collectively written, directed and performed by members of Karrabing and shot around the coastal regions of the Wadyiginy and Larrakia nations, in the Northern Territory, the films animate the contemporary struggle of Aboriginal peoples. Humorously and critically, using improvised narratives, they vocalise and image lives caught between Dreaming, traditional knowledge and family, and the realities of ongoing colonialism, socio-economic marginalisation and the contemporary market economy.

After the screening, Karrabing member Elizabeth A. Povinelli attempted to transmit the Collective’s voices from Country to Melbourne via microphone and crackly cell phone. As she did so, the physical and conceptual distance between the lives of the Karrabing actors and the metropolitan MIFF audience became tangible, problematizing Melbourne’s status as the supposed ‘cultural capital’ of Australia. ‘Whose culture?’ and ‘Liveable for who?’ should be ongoing questions for any city who cares for its inhabitants, and for any inhabitants truly invested in culture.

By Krzysztof Kosciuczuk

Work by Emil Cieslar at Pola Magnetyczne gallery, Warsaw

The 2015 edition of Warsaw Gallery Weekend (WGW), which took place the final weekend in September, was a mixed bag of treats, offering audiences the opportunity to explore the output of long-unseen artists as well as recent works by well known names. Some spaces have changed their addresses, moving out of the Praga district to nestle in venues in the city centre.

Foksal Gallery Foundation re-opened early this year, after a complete makeover by Roger Diener that left all but the original stairwell intact. Those who expect Piotr Uklánski’s solo show in the new space to feature sprawling installations of imposing proportions might feel disappointed. But while ‘Today We Can Give You Nothing But Memory’ is modest in scale, it is truly ambitious and dense in subject. Fifteen photographic prints, varying in size and technique, focus on a number sites and sights of the artist’s native country. Among them are monuments commemorating the war casualties of Warsaw, the children who perished at the hands of the Nazis and the victims of the Second World War, as well as historical landmarks like the cathedral on Krakow’s Wawel Hill, or a 1950s worker in bas-relief decorating Warsaw’s socialist realist residential district. These are interspersed with less distinct images: a dark silhouette of a tree set against a cold bluish sky, or a nocturnal cityscape with warm blurred lights looming in the distance.

Piotr Uklanski at Foksal Gallery Foundation

My initial impression is that the meticulously composed frames might make for good photo album material (some of them indeed echo historical album shots), but I quickly realized that the narrative I was spinning to connect these prints of more or less abstract forms of concrete, stone and steel, relies mostly on what each viewer brings to each picture, and what he or she makes of the artist’s captions, which offer a mixture of dry description and lines from songs and poems. I left wondering, what kind of memories are contained in images of historically and culturally laden places?

The fact that September is the month when school starts was not lost on Dawid Radziszewski, who transformed his modestly sized gallery space into a mise-en-scène for a group show titled ‘Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others’. With the gallery walls painted in a pattern of blue lines, the impression is that of being trapped inside a giant, squared notebook. A set of objects by four young artists includes a massive drawing compass by Mihuț Boșcu Kafchin, resting on the floor next to an outsized white crayon by Marcin Zarzeka, and an equally out-of-scale pair of scissors by Tomasz Kowalski propped against the window grating. In a short tour of the exhibition, the gallerist introduced each of the objects in a perfectly deadpan tone, finishing with a blank framed page by Lukasz Jastrubczak, which, as he explained, was ‘an A4 size sheet of paper enlarged to A3 size’. Enjoyable? Definitely. Profound? Not necessarily. But the show’s humour is a welcome change from last instalment’s modest show of painting.

Dawid Radziszewski at Dawid Radziszewski Gallery

This year’s WGW marked a change of venue for a few galleries, one of them being Piktogram, run by Michał Woliński, which relocated from Praga district to a downtown tenement house, a stone’s throw from the National Gallery Zacheta. Piktogram put together two solo shows that count among the Weekend’s highlights. The emptied top-floor apartment is filled with a host of fantastic characters created by Dorota Jurczak. At the entrance, a painting of an elongated figure, slightly leaning forward, pressed a button, likely a doorbell (Bzzz, 2013). Inside, I examined a glass decanter-like shape with a polymer clay head (Ludwik 6, 2015), while I felt like I was being eyed by two dark, beaked silhouettes hanging on the wall (from the ‘Brahma’ series, 2014–15). The bird is a recurring motif for Jurczak, as are matchsticks that bear characteristic facial features – seen here in a series of lithographs and canvases. Round the corner, on a plinth, sat a family of oversized hand puppets in vivid textile robes, as if they had snuck inside.

Above: Dorota Jurczak at Piktogram. Below: Szymon Roginski’s ‘One Eyed Jacks’

Several storeys below, another surreal scenario awaits those who find their way to a shut-down go-go club. The dimly lit interiors – chrome poles, tacky wallpaper and all – were not so much the setting for, as part of ‘One Eyed Jacks’, a selection of photographs by Szymon Roginski. Drawn from a number of his projects over the years, Roginski’s austere, nocturnal views of Polish towns and nondescript rural areas conjure up an uncanny vision of another world whose inhabitants have vanished. The whole situation was a brilliant nod to the eponymous casino-cum-brothel in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks.

Galeria Leto, another operation that was forced to move out of Soho Factory in Praga, presents a survey of paintings from the last two years by Radek Szlaga. In ‘All the Brutes’, Szlaga looks to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for inspiration, producing an impressive body of work where quotes from the novel and Apocalypse Now and other artists’ output merge with personal, self-reflective themes. The paintings range from suggestively figurative (C. Darwin, 2015) to nearly abstract (Unknown Artist from a Distant County, 2015). In the latter, layers of paint-stained and wrinkled canvas are stitched together into what could be a metaphorical self-portrait, which incorporates a pair of hands, a row of minuscule ape’s and human heads, and a cluster of folders from a digital desktop (‘Apes’, ‘People’, ‘Painters’ – a likely hint at Szlaga’s rich base of visual resources). Much as English for Conrad was a second language he painstakingly mastered to convey his narratives, painting for Szlaga is a chosen, acquired means of communication, in which he continues to develop his own visual vocabulary. It’s exciting to see how in ‘All the Brutes’ Szlaga puts this vocabulary to use, re-telling a tale of colonial past filtered through the lens of today’s culture.

Artist Radek Szlaga and gallerist Marta Kolakowska at Leto

At Pola Magnetyczne it’s never a simple in-and-out, not just because the gallery is part of a private home and the hosts make you feel like a welcome guest, but also because the shows there can be so much more rewarding if you take your time and ask questions. This is also true for ‘Colour Music Solfège’, where light forms melodies to the design of artist and polymath Emil Cieslar. French-born Cieslar studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in the 1950s, where he later took a teaching post. Together with his wife Elzbieta, he created a number of collaborative works and performances, as well as standing at the helm of the Repassage Gallery from 1973 to 1977, after which the couple relocated to France. It was there that Emil embarked on an investigation of colour theory and synesthesia, which engaged him for three decades. At the heart of this show are two works: Colour Organ, a system of RGB lights that the artist used to perform his scores on a white screen, and the installation Star Music, where, in a similar manner, he played a metaphoric melody of the universe observable on a black star chart. While the works are there for the audience to interact with, the actual scale of Cieslar’s design materialized in his own performances. It’s something you’ve got to listen to.

Work by Kijewski & Kocur at Propaganda

Galeria Propaganda hosts an exhibition of captivating sculptures by the duo Kijewski / Kocur, a treat considering you rarely get to see more than a few of their works together at once. In the mid-1980s, Marek Kijewski (who died in 2007), along with Miroslaw Balka and Miroslaw Filonik, co-founded the Swiadomosc Neue Bieremiennost group. A decade later, he established a different collaboration, working with his partner Malgorzata Malinowska, aka Kocur. Toghether they developed a string of works that combined elements of high and popular culture in stark and surprising ways. In ‘Golden Shot’, life-size Lego figures sit alongside rocket-like vibrators dotted with Haribo candy and sprinkled with feathers. There are totem-like objects incorporating fake fur, artificial bull horns and (real) chicken bones, and a toy chest filled with sulphur powder. Golden Shot (1996) – a sculpture of an arrow-pierced heart made of Lego, polyurethane, feathers and 24-carat gold – embodies the perverse tension between lack and excess, sexuality, religion and humour that underlies the duo’s practice.

Fragment of the projection of ‘Analysis of Emotions and Vexations’ by Wojciech Bakowski at Stereo

Galeria Stereo has moved, too, but not as far as some of their colleagues; they’re just next door to their previous location (which is presently home to Arton Foundation, which fled Praga…). On view is a recent video by Wojciech Bakowski, this year’s Grand Prix winner at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival. The 13-minute-long Analysis of Emotions and Vexations is drawn in pencil, with sections brought to life using classic stop-motion animation. The artist’s monologue leads you through a sequence of scenes in which observations mix with recollections and meandering trains of thought. The film wanders from noisy cafes to wormhole streets that inexplicably connect with places in different cities, to lonely apartments buried in residential districts. In Bakowski’s narrative, vexation mingles with nostalgia and an uneasy sense of impending change. ‘I hope that I am dead before the demolition of these blocks. Or even worse, before the Arab-Russian style turrets get added’, concludes Bakowski as we see a sketchy image of a room with a slowly fading human figure stretched out on the bed.

The WGW featured even more highlights, with solid shows by Ewa Axelrad at BWA Warszawa, Jozef Robakowski at local_30, and new work by Olaf Brzeski on view at Raster. A string of attention-grabbing exhibitions coinciding with WGW are on at public institutions, among them Zofia Rydet’s imposing ‘Record. 1978-1990’ at the Museum of Modern Art and ‘Dust’ at the Centre for Contemporary Art, which brings together artists from Belgium, Iran, Kuwait, Lebanon, Pakistan, Poland and the United Arab Emirates. The general feeling is that this year’s Warsaw Gallery Weekend was less about publicity and more about art, which made it even more enriching.

Krzysztof Kosciuczuk is a writer based in Warsaw, Poland.

By Andrew Mellor

Matmos performing Robert Ashley’s 'Perfect Lives' at Ultima Festival, Oslo. Photo: Henrik Beck

Hold on to your hats: the fierce, uncompromising, never-look-back brigade that personifies contemporary art music is all sentimental about the past. This September, Norway’s biggest new music festival celebrated 25 years of upending the expectations of the good folk of Oslo by publishing a limited edition, cloth-bound retrospective book for the occasion. In its pages – and over the four days of the festival’s opening weekend – there were copious opportunities to discuss what the last quarter-century of musical creativity has produced and how things have changed. But have they changed, honestly? Really?

Oslo certainly has. But it has taken its time. So many of the city’s new buildings, districts and attitudes seem to have sprung up in the last five years – perhaps even the last three. Ultima embraces all of Oslo’s musical institutions: a national opera company in a new building, a music academy in a new building, a newfangled dance agency in a new building and a symphony orchestra about to start work on a new building. The festival now cleaves to the city’s Vulkan district, which emerged along the cutesy Akerselva river almost overnight. Events were still scattered about Oslo’s rough-and-ready streets and surrounding mountains. But Vulkan, with its industrial-chic and its migrant trendies from elsewhere in the city bent on discovering ‘the new’, proved magnetic.

Ensemble Musikfabrik at Ultima Festival 2015, Oslo. Photo: Henrik Beck

So how is ‘the new’ dealing with all this celebration of ‘the old’? Well, it seems that looking backward is the new looking forward: the new (old) stimulus for the latest definition of a brave new modernity. Lars Petter Hagen, the composer in charge of Ultima since 2012, has made a specialty of that, in that his music explores the distances between then (Grieg, Mahler) and now, teasing with notions of tradition and national identity, pulling lovingly at all those already-frayed edges. ‘Nationhood’ was Ultima’s theme last year. This year, it was ‘Nature’, which round these parts is probably what remains of nationhood when you take out the anthems and flags.

John Persen- Mot kalde vinder (installation). Photo: Henrik Beck

A lot happens at Ultima, which made for a proper, multi-directional refraction of the theme. One morning, there was a chance to engage with nature directly. At dawn, a group of us sat in James Turrell’s Skyspace chamber (2013), cut into a hillside on the edge of the city. Turrell’s many ‘Skyspaces’ dotted across the globe, use tinted lights projected onto the walls of a funnel to frame a small patch of sky; the sky (in this case, cloud) then appears to gradually transform in shade, dimension and proximity. What really set it off here was the sonic spillover from next door. So we moved there, into a more spectacular room (either end appears to disappear) in which Elisabeth Vatn and Anders Røine wailed and keened on harmonium, Nordic bagpipes, fiddle and harp. It was a remarkable sound: rooted in folksong, pained yet beautiful, full of quiet Nordic defiance.

Henrik Hellstenius, Orets Teater III. Photo: Henrik Beck

Much of Vatn’s singing on her Nordic bagpipes – raw but cleaner and more humble in tone than we’re used to from Scottish pipes – constituted a sort of cry of the poisoned earth. Which was exactly, sonically, how Henrik Hellstenius’s On Nature had ended the night before. As this messy theatre piece lumbered into its final chapter at the Oslo Opera House, it alighted apparently randomly on a tale of two children climbing a mountain. Singers Njål Sparbo and Stine Janvin Motland – freed suddenly from the unfathomable sprawl of Hellstenius’s multi-lingual, multi-ensemble, multi-stylistic and even multi-composer creation (he borrowed liberally from Franz Schubert) – stepped up and breathed something like life, nature and a resulting artfulness into the evening. A good old-fashioned story, that’s what we needed. But even that wasn’t enough.

Perhaps On Nature, taking itself so desperately seriously, was shafted by what came immediately before it at the Opera House: a kooky, invigorating show from Plus Minus Ensemble that asked gentle questions and then, rather kindly, answered many of them, too. Matthew Shlomowitz presented his tongue-in-cheek Lecture About Bad Music with the four musicians of the ensemble behind him, demonstrating his flawed attempts to write a crap piece due to the almost inevitable victory of some sort of sonic golden ratio and the principle of ‘habituation’ – music endearing itself to the brain upon repetition. Before that, the foursome played and danced their way through Alexander Schubert’s wicked Sensate Focus, a piece for amplified instruments, electronics and strobe light effects in which the aggressive, roboticized musicians squared-up to the audience in aggression. Both acts need tightening-up, but both were onto something.

Oslo Philharmonic performing Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie, Photo: Henrik Beck

And both were signs that Ultima has relaxed; that it’s no longer a summit from which delegates must emerge having agreed on a conceptual roadmap for new music. Perhaps that, in turn, has induced this freedom to look backwards. The festival opened with a performance of Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie, hefty with passion and power from the Oslo Philharmonic under conductor Vasily Petrenko. The piece is almost 70 years old, but it still speaks of all the clashing contradictions of modernity in a language of embracing colour and pure, unbounded joy – the joy of the here-and-now.

From the cavernous Oslo Konserthus to a little gig venue on a suburban square, and a performance that, in my mind, topped the lot. A the Parkteatret, Cikada played James Dillon’s Oslo Triptych, distilled, careful music with the qualities of a rare and distinctive plant, written with ink on a page and performed with a veiled joy by the ensemble, underpinned by the gentle breath of Kenneth Karlsson’s Indian harmonium. Directly after, they played Jon Øyvind Ness’s Gimilen, a 20-minute reflection on nature in which the composer acknowledges the influence of Anton Bruckner’s calmed symphonic pace and space. The day before, I’d heard a piano monolith in 12 movements by Herman Vogt (Concordia Discors Études), which appeared to journey outward, inward, upward, downward in search of – wait for it – harmonic consonance, a neat triadic chord.

Ensemble Musikfabrik / Helge Sten. Photo: Henrik Beck

So, we’re allowed to do all this stuff now? The neat, tonal chords that were once confined to Baltic and American composers on the fringes of the contemporary music scene, certainly not heard at new music festivals, are fair game? The dead white men of Europe aren’t the embarrassing uncles at the party any more? It seems so. Perhaps Mr Hagen knows that the freedom to look to our musical past can only mean far less orthodoxy in our musical future.

Andrew Mellor is a music journalist and critic based in Copenhagen, and is founder-editor of Nordic culture websitemoosereport.net

By Declan Long

Spin-Off festival centre, designed by orrizontale for the Steirischer Herbst festival, Graz. Photo: JJ Kucek

It was mid-morning on the first day of ‘Steirischer Herbst’ – Austria’s autumn festival of progressive art, music and theatre, staged annually in the Styrian capital of Graz –and the local polizei were out in force. At either end of the sleepy side-street where I was staying, pro- and anti- immigration groups were staging simultaneous demonstrations. So far, this deliberate clash in the city’s schedule had not led to any actual, physical clashes. But precautionary security barriers had been erected and – despite the untroubled demeanour of the police rallied outside my hotel – riot gear was at the ready.

Behind one set of temporary barricades, members of a pro-refugee crowd were speaking and singing their words of solidarity in the shadow of the gloriously absurd Kunsthaus Graz: the grandly out-of-place architectural ‘blob’ designed by Peter Cook and Colin Fournier for Graz’s year as European City of Culture in 2003. Fittingly, this famous, audacious structure – a preposterous sci-fi presence in the city landscape, purposefully clashing with its ornate historical surroundings – has been affectionately nicknamed ‘the friendly alien’ by its creators.

At the opposite end of the street, occupying a normally peaceful public square, a (so far) poorly attended Austrian nationalist protest was beginning to grow in numbers. Surrounded by a cordon of shoulder-to-shoulder cops, middle-aged couples in traditional costume mingled casually with little groups of surly, shaven-headed young men. Up on a podium decorated joylessly with national and Bundesland flags, a DJ blasted out frenetic, belligerent techno. The force, pace and rabble-rousing menace of the music disturbed any expected sense of laid-back weekend routine in this quiet part of town; it was as if, suddenly, the day’s events were being played out in slow-motion and fast-forward all at once.

Kunsthaus Graz, designed by Peter Cook and Colin Fournier

At Steirischer Herbst itself, time was also moving in strange ways. The 2015 programme title was ‘Back to the Future’ – an apt theme for a forward-looking festival that describes itself as ‘avant-garde with tradition’. Amongst the art included this year, much multi-directional time travelling was evident. Walking the short distances from venue to venue on the opening day meant covering a great deal of historical ground. But this was a discontinuous, back-and-forth meander through time, occasioning brief encounters with ordinarily unconnected bits and pieces of the past and with diverse, sometimes disturbing, figures of future possibility. To move between these various exhibitions was to negotiate contrasting – even contradictory – styles of historical summation, study and speculation.

So, for instance, an approachable, unchallenging ‘retro-futuristic space station’ (conceived by Italian architecture collective orizzontale) welcomed visitors to the festival’s information centre: its clean, uncomplicated design a nostalgic nod to the lost optimism of the early space-age. Also at this location, Austrian artist group Fourdummies presented a ‘photolab for things to come’: the hub of a participatory initiative based around ‘images of the future’ contributed by local communities and festival attendees.

Fourdummies, ‘Flash Forward’. Photo: Wolfgang Silveri

Other exhibitions contemplated past, present and future connections with more difficulty and doubt. ‘What Remains: Strategies of Saving and Deleting’, a series of art and technology projects at esc medien kunst labor, gathered disparate relics of outmoded or discarded data storage systems, asking what – if anything – future societies will successfully access from our soon-to-be-forgotten, but once essential, hardware. (So should I ever wish, for the benefit of posterity, to publish my collected emails, I will need to robustly future-proof my precious personal archives.)

‘Speech Acts’ at the Forum Stadtpark also posed the question of what can be preserved of human communications. This compact but substantial four-person show featuring Michael Baers, Ricarda Denzer, Sharon Hayes and Elske Rosenfeld, carefully attended to the politics of talking. In works such as Hayes’s compelling, touching documentary Richerche: three (2013) – in which a group of students at an all-women’s US college are quizzed on attitudes to sexuality and identity – or Rosenfeld’s purposefully faltering lecture-performance about collective protest, special value is granted to moments of hesitancy and interruption in private or public speech. Here, the unavoidable agitations of back-and-forth interaction and tentative articulation in specific historical situations are recognized and recorded.

Spending time at ‘Speech Acts’ before taking in sizable exhibitions by Jörg Schlick (at Künstlerhaus) and AA Bronson (at Grazer Kunstverein) helped to highlight how these solo shows were also, in different ways, richly polyvocal situations. Graz-born artist Schlick was a restless conceptualist (leaping freely and regularly from painting to video to music to whatever else felt right at the time) and a promiscuous collaborator (founding, for example, a parodic artists’ society in the 1980s with Albert Oehlen and Martin Kippenberger). His historical ‘position’, even as a painter of coolly playful abstracts (given prominent representation here), seems best understood as one that points to many possible positions simultaneously. Singular authorial qualities perhaps matter less than the abundant conversational opportunities – between mediums, ideas and individuals – that his exuberantly wide-ranging work proposed. As such, this monographic survey of Schlick’s excitable oeuvre could easily have been mistaken for an eclectic group show.

AA Bronson and Ryan Brewer, ‘Blue’ (2011)

AA Bronson’s ostensible solo at the Kunstverein, by comparison, actually was a group show – as is consistent with this veteran artist’s predilection for collective practice. With his party of fellow travelling performers and participants – a generous, cross-generational and cross-disciplinary troupe – Bronson staged a sequence of quasi-theatrical scenarios, drawing on religious rituals and magical rites in order to newly channel experiences of loss, trauma and oppression within gay culture. If, for this writer at least, the determined turn towards the spiritual and the shamanic in Bronson’s recent work is a dead-end escape route from modernity (and mortality) his venturesome explorations of these folkloric realms nonetheless produce scenes of deep sadness and gorgeous strangeness.

Through the lenses of myth and magic, Bronson and friends aimed to offer a broadened perspective on reality and history. But the effort to expand our apprehension of time was at its most extreme, and successful, in Steirischer Herbst’s central exhibition, ‘Hall of Half-Life’, and its associated projects. Curated by Tessa Giblin of Project Arts Centre in Dublin – easily the most energetic and imaginative institutional curator working in Ireland today – this was an intense get-together of 14 artists (or artist duos), each of whom, in Giblin’s view, copes uniquely well with the necessary present-day strain of working with ‘one eye looking forward, the other looking back.’

Stéphane Béna Hanly, “Length of a Legacy” (Schloßberg), 2015 in ‘Hall of Half-Life’

The question of how far human society is capable of looking into the past or the future – and how much we can learn from what we may discover – was fundamental to the exhibition’s investigations. ‘Hall of Half-Life’ set off from two primary reference points: one general, one specific. The first was the philosophically fashionable concept of the Anthropocene: that recently articulated scientific framework for the planetary epoch defined by humanity’s decisive, irreversible impact. (And a term becoming so prevalent in art discourse that I propose an online column tracking its ubiquitous appearances: let’s call it ‘AnthropoScene and Herd’.)

Giblin’s second inspiration, triggering the show’s title, is the near-incomprehensible timeline associated with a profound modern problem: the treatment of nuclear waste. Taking thematic direction from Peter Galison and Robb Moss’s astonishing film installation Landscapes of Stopped Time (2015) – a meditative study of radioactive clean-up and containment sites in New Mexico, South Carolina and Fukushima, Japan, presented as a centre-piece of the main show at the Graz Museum – Giblin wished to reflect on art’s place within the expanded time-frame of nuclear recovery.

If (as an accompanying text asked) the half-life of plutonium is 24,000 years, and ten half-lives are required to guarantee the total eradication of dangerous radiation, how might hazardous ground be marked in ways that can communicate a warning 240,000 years into the future? To develop exhibition ideas in the context of such problems, or within such a vast periodization as that of the Anthropocene, is to seek dramatically augmented understandings of what TJ Clark once described as ‘the complex and specific material of a single artist’s historical situation and experience.’ But, given the puzzle of messaging future generations, Giblin also seems concerned to ask how art (again to adapt Clark) can consciously work the historical ‘material’ that it is made from.

Jean-Luc Moulène, ‘
Laura Bush, George Walker Bush, George Herbert Walker Bush’ in ‘Hall of Half-Life’.
Foto: Gudrun Becker

The works in ‘Hall of Half-Life’ were thus variously engaged with deep-time history and with the challenge of finding a position and perspective within it. Some therefore considered the long-term meaning of physical memorials to human belief, achievement or power (pieces by Harun Farocki, Jean-Luc Moulène and newcomer Stéphane Béna Hanly). Others took on questions of psychology, technology and time (Gerard Byrne, Regina de Miguel). Others again looked underground to exhume buried histories, or sought to query human relationships with natural resources (diversely site-studying contributions by Mikhail Karikis, Simon Boudvin, Lara Almarcegui, Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan).

All of the above approaches applied, in some measure, to Sam Keogh’s installation and performance at the Graz Museum: a work that maniacally montaged images of ancient, preserved ‘bog bodies’ (curling underfoot in a floor-covering vinyl photograph) with narrative and visual snapshots relating both to touch-screen museum mediation systems and – vaulting forward in imagined time – to the technological consciousness of ‘Bishop’, the synthetic human in James Cameron’s dystopian sci-fi 1986 classic Aliens.

Ulla von Brandenburg, “Wolken lösen sich in Wasser”. 
Foto: Wolfgang Silveri

Keogh’s frenzied work was one of several that involved live action as well as complex representation. New commissions from Mikala Dwyer and Ulla Van Brandenburg – the main components of which were situated in small towns quite a distance from Graz – were based on ongoing or prospective situations of interaction and collaboration. Von Brandenburg’s _Clouds Dissolve in Water _(2015) was a theatrical environment designed for the Porubsky Halle in Leoben: this was a brightly decorative space, conceived with reference to principles of Baroque illusionistic painting, but without prescribed purpose. It was an open environment, a place for performance or dialogue, whose future meaning was yet to be determined.

One outcome of Dwyer’s ambitious project St. Jude’s Leftovers (2015) took place in Von Brandenberg’s elegantly indeterminate theatre – a group performance evoking an unnamed occult ceremony – but the core of Dwyer’s work was located further beyond Graz in the former mining town of Vordernberg. Once defined by the excavation of iron ore from the mountain landscape, this district now accommodates a different industry: the processing of asylum seekers. Dwyer’s public work for the town’s mining museum brought these different histories into unlikely convergence, using a large LED screen (attached to the main furnace of the redundant plant) to display transcribed conversations with Graz-based refugees. In its forceful conjoining of digital communications, industrial relics, geological resources and current socio-political realities, Dwyer’s work seemed an exemplary experiment in the context of Giblin’s (and the wider festival’s) framing themes. Here, as in other contributions to the ‘Hall of Half-Life’, a far-reaching perspective on historical change was crucially coupled with clear-eyed attention to the growing tensions of present circumstances.

Declan Long is Co-Director of the ‘Art in the Contemporary World’ MA Programme at the National College of Art & Design, Dublin.