A vital resource and a habitat we have in common with other creatures, which we have harnessed to our own ends without heed to the environmental consequences, water has been of growing concern to artists and curators all over the world, partly due to the rising awareness of climate change, rising sea levels and other pressing ecological issues Continue reading Troubled Waters
We come from the sea. We don’t think about it very often but […] our semi-circular canals are similar, our eyes are similar, we have backbones. And the fish grew little legs and came out of the sea and then developed into what we are today. There are different theories about how that happened. My idea is that we have a memory of that. Somewhere in our unconscious we remember that we come from the sea. It’s not a memory; it’s a feeling; it’s in our DNA. Continue reading We Come from the Sea
This review of Joan Jonas’ Light Time Tales at HangarBicocca in Milan appeared in Metropolis M magazine in Dutch translation: Joan Jonas, Light Time Tales, 2014, courtesy Fondazione Hangar Bicocca, photo: Agostino Osio Visiting Joan Jonas’s ‘anthological exhibition’ (as opposed to plain ‘retrospective’) ‘Light Time Tales’ at HangarBicocca is like a stroll through a memory palace. The industrial space is indeed palatial: vast enough to hold Anselm Kiefer’s permanent installation The Seven Heavenly Palaces (2004) with its unwieldy modular towers made of reinforced concrete, rising to a height of 18 meters. And the twenty works that make up the exhibition, … Continue reading Joan Jonas: Light Time Tales
A review of Performa13: It’s not every day you get to see a saxophone being deep-fried on the High Line. The deed was done when I got there, but the smell of it lingered in the air. (A deep-fried saxophone smells much like anything deep-fried, only more so.) A friend gave me a blow-by-blow account of Jamal Cyrus’s Texas Fried Tenor, borne out by photographic evidence showing the crowd’s reaction to this jaw-dropping event brought to us by Performa, jointly with NYU’s Grey Art Gallery and The Studio Museum in Harlem (as part of the controversial Radical Presence: Black Performance … Continue reading Performa Through the Senses
Conversation Pieces 