Reviews
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.
Clouds, Power, and Ornament: Roving Central Asia
Cameron Downey: Lord Split Me Open
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.
Singapore Biennale: Natasha
The Eyes Were Always on Us
It Shall Not Be Named – Carlos Motta: Your Monsters, Our Idols
Tamia Alston-Ward’s
Le Déracinement (The Uprooting)
Cornell Labs Panama Fruit Feeder Cam at Canopy Lodge
The Fruit Feeder can be viewed as a kind of durational performance art. Its participants may be unaware of their roles, but they perform their daily dramas nevertheless. Fights between peckish birds over the best bit of mango or the prime perch on a branch often rattle the otherwise tranquil setting. The overwhelming growth and decay of the surrounding forest and the exhausting, relentless tussle between life and death infuse the scene with a kind of madness