Reviews
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
The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
Korakrit Arunanondchai and Alex Gvojic: PRAY
Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere
Each collaborative entity mobilizes its own kind of micro-performance, but together they maintain a coherence through the way we simultaneously apprehend them in the sensorium. As such, the materials feel less instrumentalized by aesthetics and more mysterious.
Monira Al Qadiri: Refined Vision
Whereas fossil fuel exploration happens on a global scale, Al Qadiri zeroes in on extraction and refinement, which are much more visible at ground level in certain regions of the world. This exhibition drew a nuanced connection between the Persian Gulf region and the Texas Gulf Coast (although not noted in the exhibition information, the processing infrastructure of the latter region certainly extends into southern Louisiana).