circulation
Erasing Pronouns: Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s Ottilia
Counter Ecologies
Radical Radixes—On Lili Dujourie’s Mimesis
The work consists of an upright, kinked, and broken cylinder, from the base of which protrude zigzagging, forked rods; the whole evokes a barren tree trunk, its roots growing down the sides of its plinth, clinging to it. Two of the roots reach the pavement and one touches the steps, mimicking the way that some trees survive on rocks or walls by rooting around them.
Of Oysters, Roaches, and New Pessimism in Hong Kong
It’s all very Videodrome. That body horror manifests in phone-breath-bed 3 (2023), a sculpture presented in its own small room. A silicone face emerges out of a Perspex panel, where, lower down, a silicone slab forms a womblike concave depression. The panel hovers over the form of a hospital bed with the support of gray plastic piping, whose mattress is a screen-skin painting with creased dermal folds framing silicone protrusions that swell from the flatness.
Chase Hall: Sweat Equity
Clouds, Power, and Ornament: Roving Central Asia
Cameron Downey: Lord Split Me Open
Behavior Conditioner: The Narrative Imagination of Ian Cheng
The 16th Lyon Biennale: manifesto of fragility
Moments like these, where the show drilled down on its complex resistance to heteronormativity (and thus paternalism), heightened the breakdown at Usines Fagor, with its abundance of large-scale installations that, while meaningful—as with Dana Awartani’s Standing by the Ruins of Aleppo (2021), a clay brick reproduction of the courtyard floor in Aleppo’s Grand Mosque—hinted at a curatorial anxiety to fill the site’s cavernous spaces.