If Indian artists have always been considered “cosmopolitan,” it’s perhaps because we tend to think of their migration outside of India towards Europe and the Americas: Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore reading law in London in the 1870s, or the world citizenship of Vikram Seth. Looking at “The Imaginary Institution of India,” I was propelled to consider migrations and movements within India itself: the circulation across time and place of artists, their works, and their ideas.
The exhibition’s chief draw is Murni, whose works, executed in her signature style of flat, simple forms in bold outlines and bright colors, operate in the register of the squalid-sacred: dicks, vaginas, breasts, high heels and sharp nails in all manner of hybridizations, permutations, and penetrations. Sexuality can be pain or pleasure, weakness or empowerment, sordid or spiritual.
If there was one exhibition that tapped into the Tunisian zeitgeist during Jaou, the contemporary art biennial organised in Tunis by the Kamel Lazaar Foundation, it was “Hopeless.” Curated by Chiraz Mosbah on the grounds of Club Aviron Tunisois, with storehouses for kayaking and rowing perched on the edge of the water, the show references a desire among many young Tunisians to leave the county, given its struggling economy and increasing authoritarianism, and its position as a crucial crossing point for clandestine migrants.
Photography has allowed Abdouni to excavate, reinvent, and remember queer histories in Arab cultures. Here he shifts view to his home region of Beqaa, Lebanon. In pulling apart family photo albums, subjecting them to the scrutiny of his loving but unsentimental gaze, the artist returns to his childhood navigations within the complex cultural norms of a heterosexual masculinity and male camaraderie that embody Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theory of “male homosocial desire” grounded in anti-queerness.
Alÿs built his project around the Strait of Gibraltar, which is one of the most visible hinges between the Global North and Global South. In ongoing, so-called “postcolonial” forms of resource extraction, multinational corporations and debt service payments, alongside internal state corruption and dysfunction, funnel wealth out of African countries, thereby helping to propel the tide pushing workers and families toward Europe and the United States.
Like many recent exhibitions of a similar size, “Mil Graus” presents a mix of recurring themes that can feel unmanageable. It’s as if the inclusion of concepts ranging from ecology and the post-Anthropocene world to colonization, queerness, identity, ritualism, or the sometimes-disconcerting mix of the esoteric and the political, all melted into the same pot, were a mandatory bureaucratic requirement.
The City May Now Scatter
