This tendency to compulsively explain the works on view can leave little space or time for audiences to come to their own understanding of what is put before them. Instead of according such importance to what we are told, what if we turned to the art’s unknowns: the gaps, ambiguities and enigmas that interpretive tools are seldom calibrated to measure?
In early spring, Kobby Adi’s exhibition, ‘Music’, at London’s Cabinet Gallery included five near-identical works. Each ‘Instrument’ (2023–24) consists of a bimetal thermometer whose dial has been doctored to show, in addition to the ambient temperature, a black wedge indicating the average range of the internal temperature of a specific animal. The sculptures identify mammals – alpaca, goat, rabbit, pig and sheep – that run slightly hotter than healthy humans. Lined up on the wall amid these gauges hung ‘Untitled’ (2023–24), a row of seven tonewood fragments from a luthier’s workshop – some rough-hewn, others finely turned and polished. On the left-most element, someone has drawn an arrow pointing to the internal angle of a roughly L-shaped piece of blonde wood and scribbled: problème!
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der Issue 243 - May 2024-Ausgabe von Frieze.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der Issue 243 - May 2024-Ausgabe von Frieze.
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Open Invitation
HOSTING PERFORMANCE in institutions, particularly those that have historically presented more traditional formats, is both tempting and tricky.
Winner Takes It All
IN THE EARLY 1990S, Donald Rodney assembled a collection of more than 100 cheap sporting and academic trophies, such as those typically available in local shops, and displayed them on shelves that ran the length of the gallery wall, and in purpose-made glazed and mirrored cabinets.
Graham Little
There is no formula for beauty, no reliable unit of measure.
Marcel Dzama
Canoe Lake, in Algonquin Park, Ontario, is where the great Canadian landscape painter Tom Thomson occasionally lived and worked – and where, at the age of 39, he drowned.
Shuvinai Ashoona
Crawling with tentacled creatures, flipper-footed beasts and beaked hybrids, Shuvinai Ashoona’s colourful pencil drawings are playful and fantastical depictions of Inuit life in the Canadian Arctic.
Regina José Galindo and Iva Lulashi
The female figure predominates in the works of Guatemalan visual and performance artist Regina José Galindo and Albanian artist Iva Lulashi.
Bettina Pousttchi
‘Progressions’, Bettina Pousttchi’s survey at Zurich’s Haus Konstruktiv, is a striking illustration of the idea that urban space is not only the physical environment of a city – from pedestrian and surveillance structures to actual buildings – but also a projection, subject to both time-bound ideologies driving urban policy and to city dwellers’ subjective memories. Spread across three floors, the exhibition highlights the fluidity with which Pousttchi moves between industrial-scale readymades, urban architecture and photography.
Nidhal Chamekh
Taking its title from philosopher Édouard Glissant’s question, ‘What If Carthage Hadn’t Been Destroyed?’ – posed in his book of collected poems Le Sel Noir (The Black Salt, 1957) – Nidhal Chamekh’s latest exhibition, ‘Et si Carthage’, is inspired by the ancient city whose ruins are a ten-minute drive from Selma Feriani’s new gallery space in downtown Tunis.
Green Snake: Women-Centred Ecologies
When I was younger, my mother told me a story about a man who travelled to a faraway lake in China, where he met a beautiful young woman dressed in white and spent the night on her boat.
Whitney Biennial 2024
With this year’s Whitney Biennial already having been dismissed by many critics (The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vulture) as riskless, I felt hard-pressed to agree.