Reviews

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.

Type:
Reviews
Source:
February 1, 2023
Location:
Cambridge, MA
Credit:
Text / Laurel V. McLaughlin

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).

Type:
Reviews
Source:
Winter 2022
Location:
Houston, TX, Blaffer Art Museum
Credit:
Text / Park Myers

Leah Clements—INSOMNIA

Providing access to the exhibition for blind and partially sighted people, this audio description acts as a way in for all audiences. Excitingly, here, through this interpretive sonic contribution, the visual aid becomes an affective feature rather than simply a functional element. It affects pace, the order of encounter, and the awareness of oneself in the environment, embedding us within it. It asks us to pay attention, to be indulgent with our time, and in so doing, to allow details and sensations to emerge.

Type:
Reviews
Source:
January 18, 2023
Location:
London, UK
Credit:
Text/ Kit Edwards

Fuego Nuevo —Sergio Suárez

Through a combination of printmaking, ceramics, and installation, Sergio Suárez uses distinct traditional techniques to assemble a visual language, one that examines the fusion, impermanence, and consistency of objects, images, and structures. The exhibition is framed by the Meso-American, post-classical-period ceremony Fuego Nuevo (New Fire)—a ritual enacted every 52 years to ensure that the sun would return, thus staving off the end of the world.

Type:
Reviews
Source:
December 30, 2022
Location:
Atlanta, GA
Credit:
Text/ Jacob O'Kelley

Hito Steyerl: I Will Survive

Hito Steyerl is one of the most important artists of her generation, a landmark thinker of the image and its status under late capitalist accelerationism. Yet her recent retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum, I Will Survive, was marked by a semiotic complexity that did not coincide with what had been happening to the body in the past two years—my body, but also the body in a broader philosophical sense.

Type:
Reviews
Source:
Fall 2022
Location:
Amsterdam
Credit:
Text / Natasha Marie Llorens

Azza El Siddique: In the place of annihilation, where all the past was present and returned transformed

Azza El Siddique’s exhibition at MIT List Visual Arts Center is a treatise on scent and transformation. In the place...
Type:
Reviews
Source:
Fall 2022
Location:
Boston
Credit:
Text / Courtney McClellan