Summer 2021: out now
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In this issue:
U in a movie called The Green Ray
“August the month it’s meant to happen. Plans get made, the fleetingness of the ruse. She gets dropped within minutes: no more vacation.” Straddling fiction and object-oriented writing, Travis Jeppesen revisits Éric Rohmer’s The Green Ray (1986), sketching the main character Delphine’s torments as she (“U”) is left without plans just as Paris is emptying out for the summer.
Ten Short Fictions on Works by Joachim Bandau
Between 1967 and 1974, Joachim Bandau made a series of fiberglass works fusing the anthropomorphic with eerie appropriations from technology and industry. Entering into the playful, experimental, and uncanny spirit of Bandau’s sculptures, Nick Currie responds with ten short works of fiction.
Contact Barrier
Patricia L. Boyd speaks with Dora Budor on probing the architectural, emotional, and psychological boundaries of an institution; what the compartmentalization of physical spaces means for inner experience and thinking; barriers, negative spaces, and loaned perceptions; and Hold, her recent exhibition at Kunstverein München.
Primary Resistance
“With animals, the left turns right.” This was the outset for Fahim Amir’s award-winning book Being and Swine: The End of Nature (as We Knew It) (2020). In conversation with Sohrab Mohebbi, Amir deepens the subject of “solidarity with animals,” locating his discourse within a Marxist tradition and expanding it into a post-development train of thought that questions anthropocentric socialism and capitalist exploitation.
Focus on: Julie Becker
The Delirium of Digression
Outside the Vitrine (Julie Becker, Sparkle Woman)
“Distortions in time, changes in scale, senses of derealization and depersonalization. Makeshift force fields, cardboard boxes, corners of the mind, and iconic figures mobilized as transports of the imagination capable of stirring the mind out of its single room-squalor and into a ‘larger more complex world.’” In “The Delirium of Digression,” Sabrina Tarasoff ponders Julie Becker’s imagery as a domestically shaped fever dream, while in “Outside the Vitrine (Julie Becker, Sparkle Woman)” Mark von Schlegell recalls his friendship with Becker by way of her obsession with the immediate world around her: her studio, her apartment, her neighborhood in Los Angeles. “By revealing the illusionary foundations of cultural projects in which the only escape is for the purpose of eternal return, Becker approached the inside as a special case of the outside wasteland, a site of living, layered presences, fetishizing and fixing their absences on the flat surface of things.”
Once Upon a Time There Was a Phantasmatic Storyteller
Author of an autonomous, experimental, and both intimate and radically political practice, Giuseppe Desiato epitomizes the heterodox intellectual in the history of contemporary Italian art. According to Andrea Viliani, Desiato stages the archetype of a Mediterranean sensibility, that “southern” and popular exception that the tension toward modernity has systematically forced to the margins.
A Heart Pierced by an Angel’s Spear
“I want to disrupt the way language is formed,” notes Tarek Lakhrissi, referring to a practice rooted in literature. Conversing with Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artist unfolds his inspirations from pop culture and how his research on queerness, emotions, spirituality, education, decoloniality, and empowerment points to the creation of spaces of sharing and community.
On Those Shores But in These Shoes
Delving into Ingrid Pollard’s work, Ella S. Mills outlines resonances and interpretations of the sea in the artist’s practice. Combining photography, text, found objects, personal photos, and letters, Pollard explores traditional landscape, portraiture, ingrained social constructs, national identity, ownership, borders, and grand narratives of history.
Tidbits:
Penny Goring by Dodie Bellamy; Alexandra Noel by Travis Diehl; Laurie Kang by Alexandra Symons Sutcliffe; Yannis Tsarouchis by Krzysztof Kościuczuk; Angharad Williams by Gabriela Acha; Tarik Kiswanson by Philipp Hindahl; Leda Bourgogne by Stanton Taylor; Rosa Barba by Alessandro Rabottini; Sophie Barber by Rosie Cooper; Gaëlle Choisne by Ludovic Delalande.
Book reviews by Monica Bonvicini.
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