Stephanie Bailey
ECHOES Episode 5
How To Make an Old World New?
Notes on the Whales in the Room
Entwined with the whaling industry, then, which peaked in the mid-19th century, was the violence of a colonial modernity that rendered the world open for the taking.
The 2nd Helsinki Biennial’s Call to Action
The 12th Liverpool Biennial: Actual and Curatorial Displacements
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
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.