The Lower World
Agnes Denes
The Living Pyramid
These paintings, at once intimate yet slightly detached, capture snapshots of ordinary lives and monumentalize them in his signature dry style. When not drawing directly from quotidian life, Davis turned to mythology and the imagination, and so viewing these paintings is like waking up from a dream and trying to piece it together, to recollect the faces of the people that appeared within it, coming up short, and filling in the gaps with hazy approximations. Yet even here the same preoccupation with history and society is present.
Henrot produces dramatic shifts in scale through oversized sculptures of toys and biomorphic abacuses, encouraging viewers to take the perspective of both adult and child. She covers the gallery with a gridded green safety surface that resembles a “self-healing” cutting mat, a custom floor that unifies the disparate artworks as in a playground or a theater. Yet she has subtly distorted the grid, undermining the structuring order it purports to provide. If Henrot’s installation suggests a playscape, it is—like Wonderland—off-kilter, mysterious, and full of obstacles.
Malik Nejmi’s ambitious retrospective, co-curated with Louise Bras and presented in a deconsecrated twelfth-century church, poses a fundamental question: can architecture be a tool for collective and individual care? At the heart of this exhibition of photographs, videos, sculptures, installations, archival documents, and architectural ephemera is the neighborhood of La Source, on the outskirts of Orléans, where the Franco-Moroccan artist grew up.
“It did not happen.” Flickering across one of the screens in Huda Takriti’s Starry Nights / Or, of that night when stars disappeared (2025), these words haunt this exhibition of three artists from across the Arab world. Curated by May Makki, the show borrows its title from Freud’s 1899 essay of the same name, in which the “father of psychoanalysis” questions the processes by which early memories are transmuted into other forms, false recollections, and allusive narratives, that are more palatable to the conscious mind and “screen” us from the past.
Described by Mélanie Courtinat, a Paris-based artist and art director, as an “interactive experience,” The Siren (2024) is a video game of sorts, but one that is intended, as most such “art” games are, to induce in the player a self-consciousness about what it means to play such a game and the mechanics of narrative-meaning that attend to gameplay itself. Produced using Unreal Engine, an industry-leading programme for creating immersive digital 3D environments, The Siren has the look and feel of other contemporary adventure games built with the same engine.
Art institutions have thus become refuges for activities outside the traditional remits of the arts and humanities. That museums are now expected to serve an educational function—that their public funding is often made dependent upon this—might be understood as a function of the managed (which is to say politicized) decline in funding for state education (so that creative workers are now expected to pick up the slack). Likewise, talk of transforming museums into spaces of “healing” and “care” begs the question of why our governments are not purpose-building new institutions dedicated to those values.
As of February 25, 2025, Kingston University management has proposed the closure of the entire Department of Humanities, including the world-renowned Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), from which we, the undersigned, write today.
Honey
