A Comparative Dialogue Act
Lim’s late work distills the forms and movements of leaves, flowers, bones, starfish, and shells. River-Run (1992–93) is a horizontal stone slab with seven lines of varying lengths carved across, with their subtle curves conveying the lines in a Japanese raked garden, or the drift of a current; the squarish stone relief Syncopation I (1995) comprises a series of diagonal slashes coming in from the edges that resemble the vein pattern of a leaf. In these works, Lim sought to evoke a sense of balance, which she described as “a symmetry that is experienced rather than actual.”
The installation of La Gola at the Kunsthalle Wien, in a cavernous gallery with just a small central island of theatre seats, evokes the escapism and solitude of cinema-going, and the film presents a hermetic world of finely wrought surfaces: rarefied allusions, complicated technologies, meticulously crafted melodies and words. Its script is a web of aesthetic resemblances in which art, cuisine, and illness become entangled.
Eight years of government by the right-wing Law and Justice party, which came to an end a year ago, severely damaged Poland’s cultural sector, not least by undermining the credibility of the capital’s art institutions. In these circumstances, the responsibility of safekeeping Warsaw’s reputation as a regional hub for contemporary art fell to its commercial galleries. In spite—or perhaps because of—the political and economic climate, recent years have also seen a growing number of non-commercial and artist-led initiatives in Warsaw, gathered together by the annual FRINGE festival.
Purusha’s cultural status is encapsulated in Mark Thompson’s Leatherfolk: “Regarded as a sexual metaphysician ahead of his time by some,” he was “dismissed as a kinky California crazy man by others.” The sweetly reverent, even wistful Sanctuary falls into the former camp. But Ashby masterfully avoids the potential pitfalls of such an approach—such as reiterating generations-old clichés about the afterlives of pre-AIDS sexual utopianism, or didactically confronting the knottily “problematic” elements of Purusha’s pre-queer-theory ideas—by grounding the film’s visuals in the environments of its present-day speakers.
No longer are we in Hong Kong, but somewhere in Tây Nguyên, located within the Southeast Asian Massif known as Zomia, its complex textures expressed by a chorus of sculptures, installations, and instruments created by Art Labor—founded in 2012 by artists Thao Nguyen Phan, Truong Cong Tung, and Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran—and collaborators from the Indigenous Jarai community, with whom Art Labor have been working since 2016, alongside invited artists.
The causes of the 2011 unrest—police brutality, defunded social services, staggering inequality—were quickly forgotten amidst outrage at theft and “destruction of property” by those quickly labeled as rioters and looters. The current prime minister, Keir Starmer, was at that time head of the Crown Prosecution Service, overseeing 24-hour courts that handed out summary justice. Starmer’s government was elected just a few months ago on a slogan of “change”; he followed the same judicial playbook when dealing with the far-right, anti-immigration protests and riots that swept the country this summer.