At the heart of Sammy Baloji’s exhibition “K(C)ongo Fragments of Interlaced Dialogues. Subversive Classifications” were four exquisitely carved ivory oliphants, or hunting horns, from the Kingdom of Kongo. Two of these carvings belonged to Florentine banker and arts patron Cosimo I de’ Medici. Continue reading Sammy Baloji
Inaugurating her exhibition program as the newly appointed director at the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (EMST), curator Katerina Gregos’s multifaceted group show “Statecraft (and beyond)” revisited some of the themes she previously explored and even some of the same works that were featured in “The State Is Not a Work of Art” at the Tallinn Art Hall in 2018, conceived with the centennial of Estonian independence in mind. Continue reading Statecraft (and beyond)
Primrose, pervotsvet in Russian (literally meaning “first color”), gives its name to this expansive exhibition spanning over a century of experimentation with color photography, which in Russia—as in the rest of Europe—really took off in the 1860s.
Continue reading Primrose: Early Russian Color Photography
“Poems I Will Never Release 2007–2017,” a traveling retrospective dedicated to the late Chiara Fumai, follows its debut in Geneva with this staging in the artist’s home country. Continue reading Chiara Fumai
Sex, Lies, and Videotape – the title of Steven Soderbergh’s Palme d’Or-winning 1989 film – sums up Wolfgang Stoerchle’s artistic journey charted in this intriguing solo exhibition. The presentation at Macro is a showcase for editor Alice Dusapin’s extensive research dedicated to this eccentric, well-loved, and yet somewhat forgotten figure of the Californian art scene in the 1970s. Continue reading Wolfgang Stoerchle
At the heart of an exhibition that explores how the internet and social media have altered and, in some ways, trivialised our experience of love and intimacy, there is a nostalgic longing for closeness, physical presence and romance that harks back to a more analogue era. Continue reading Modern Love
Paljassaare means “naked island.” The peninsula visible across the water from Kai was called that because there used to be no trees on it (and not on account of its nudist beach). It is now densely wooded in places, and home to numerous bird species that inspired the exhibition’s soundscape Continue reading Leviathan: the Peljassaare Chapter
For those familiar with their respective practices, the pairing of Mihkel Ilus and Paul Kuimet for a duo show at one of Estonia’s most established contemporary art venues was not an obvious choice, and it was something of a curatorial gambit. Continue reading Mihkel Ilus and Paul Kuimet
The Slavic folk tale of Koschei the Immortal, a predatory male figure who steals maidens from their suitors and escapes death by hiding his soul in the eye of a needle, placed inside an egg, which is itself hidden inside a duck that flies away if one tries to catch it, has medieval antecedents. Continue reading Ural Industrial Biennial
Conversation Pieces 