Rochelle Feinstein, Ali Cherri, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz

Rochelle Feinstein: The Today Show
For over forty years, the American painter Rochelle Feinstein has developed an oeuvre that infiltrates abstract painting with political, social and environmental concerns. Throughout a series of diverse yet thematically interwoven groups of works, Feinstein cuts, flips, and rearranges printed gestural marks that are then collaged into paintings; she also makes sculptures and prints out of everyday materials. The Today Show presents a range of newly created works that circulate around the question of how to connect canvas, color and gesture with the specific personal and public conditions of our time.

Feinstein was, until her recent retirement, a professor of painting and printmaking at Yale School of Art. Her works engage with different modes of abstraction, like the grid or color-field painting, all the while letting life crash against modernist notions of art’s autonomy from external reality. 

Whereas twentieth-century modernists propagated a strict separation of painting from the outside world, reducing the medium to colors on a flat surface, Feinstein’s abstractions are intimately connected to the world in all of its chaos: here, art is not a way to escape life’s terrors, nor a realm to immerse oneself in a “pure” and detached perceptual experience. The works therefore confront us with the mess of our reality, its inconsistencies, offensiveness and affections. In this manner, The Today Show also recalls the name of a news show; a humorous hint to the works’ diverse references to contemporary politics and pop culture. 

For Feinstein, painting is not a window to a closed illusionary world but fundamentally situated in the here and now. Its material conditions and the process of art-making are a vital aspect of the presentation, as seen in the blue painter’s tape that frames a series of works in the exhibition, or when the canvases are not stretched but rather hang on the wall like cloth. Feinstein makes it clear: she is keenly aware of painting’s alleged higher cultural values. And yet, one can feel the artist’s belief in the potential of her chosen medium to work at the heart of our shared world.

Rochelle Feinstein was born in the Bronx and lives and works in New York City.

Programmed by the board of the Secession. Curated by Damian Lentini.

Ali Cherri: How I Am Monument
With his films, sculptures, installations and drawings, Ali Cherri visualizes history and cultural value not as something neutral or universal, but as constructed narratives, deeply influenced by colonialism, nationalism and geopolitics. Cherri was born in Beirut in 1976, a year into the Lebanese Civil War that would continue for fourteen more (1975–1990). During its course, about 120,000 people died and almost one million were forced to leave the country. But Cherri, who was initially trained as a graphic designer, experienced the vibrant heyday of Beirut’s art scene in the 1990s. Thus, not only the conceptual and material engagement with violence, but also the belief in the power of imagination as a political force carries his work. 

Mythology and ancient history as well as the afterlife of cultural artefacts play a key role in Cherri’s practice, who sources archaeological relics in auction houses or antiquities markets. “Many of these objects,” the artist explains, “are literally broken or damaged, and I see in this a poetic way to establish solidarity with other broken bodies. Today, we all carry our own fractures and thus seek connection with other beings and communities who share similar experiences, from whom we can learn and with whom we can empathize.” By integrating these fragments into hybrid, creature-like sculptures that radiate a surreal energy, Cherri introduces the forgotten, excluded or suppressed into Western collections. Questioning what is visible, and what remains obscured, his works get to the foundations of Western museums’ practices and their power to shape the official canon and discourse through colonial politics of collecting and contextualizing. 

In Cherri’s work, political implications are not only evident on a symbolic level, but also in the choice of artistic materials themselves. He is especially interested in mud, a primordial material of civilization in the production of commodities but also of art and cult objects. Only recently, he has begun to work with bronze, primarily used by ruling classes for monuments of “heroes” that shall manifest the power and dominance of the current regime. By combining these contrasting materials in a new series of works, the artist turns the classical power dynamic upside down: the moisture of the fragile, “inferior” mud aggresses and weakens the “hegemonial,” lasting bronze—a reclamation of power. 

Alongside a new installation and a slide-projection dealing with monuments and their dismantling, Secession presents Cherri’s celebrated three-channel video installation Of Men and Gods and Mud (2022), for which he was awarded the Silver Lion at the 59th Venice Biennale. He shot this work at the Merowe Dam on the Nile River in Northern Sudan. In the early 2000s, the construction of the largest hydropower plant in Africa led to the displacement of more than 50,000 people, social unrest, the destruction of ecosystems, and the submersion of cultural sites and artifacts. The film follows a group of brickmakers as they shape by hand these fundamental building materials from mud. And again, both destruction and creation go hand in hand, asking: how to build a new world from the mud of the past?

Ali Cherri was born in Beirut in 1976 and lives and works in Paris.

Programmed by the board of the Secession. 
Curated by Jeanette Pacher.

The exhibition has been developed in partnership with Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, where a second, extended chapter will be presented from April 12 – September 21, 2025. In the framework of this collaboration, the partners have co-commissioned new works by the artists.

Ali Cherri, The Dam—Austrian premiere!
February 18, 2025, 7pm
Stadtkino im Künstlerhaus
Followed by a discussion with Ali Cherri
A cooperation with the University for Continuing Education Krems and Stadtkino im Künstlerhaus

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz. Elogio al disparate
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz is a firm believer in the transformative potential of the camera to re-imagine and re-signify the world. At the center of her three films shown at the Secession is, of all things, nonsense. The newly produced works that were shot on 16 mm stock and then transferred to video use free association and formal play to build relationships between sound and image that are not to be grasped by “making” rational sense. 

The three films are inspired by jitanjáforas, invented nonsense words, and their exuberant use in Caribbean poetry and music in the twentieth century. These speculative words mostly unfold their poetic dimensions in their phonetic properties. They favor chaos, dissonance and revolutionary spirit over reactionary concepts of fixed truths that secure the political and societal status quo. 

Muñoz’s films, too, invent “new words” and use formal methods such as attention to rhythm, shape, sound and movement while interrupting linear story-telling and the traditional production of meaning. The title of the work, Elogio al disparate (In Praise of Nonsense) refers to a short essay by the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930) on the poems of his compatriot, the writer Martín Adán (1908–1985). Mariátegui honors the power of nonsense as a denunciation of a fraudulent spirit and the philosophy of the old order and writes that it is this disorder that can speed its dissolution. 

Muñoz’s practice mostly revolves around her native Puerto Rico, with references to Haitian poetics and feminist speculative fictions. Considered the world’s oldest colony, the island was under Spanish rule for over four centuries, followed by the U.S.’s invasion during the Spanish-American War in 1898. Whereas Puerto Rico is primarily known through exoticized portrayals, Muñoz tackles its political and ecological crises involving gentrification and displacement as well as its post-military spaces. Aiming to formulate alternative narratives, the artist often works with non-actors from local communities including activists or healers, whom she invites to reenact events from their own popular culture, history, and Indigenous mythology. 

Muñoz’s works are rooted in long-term observation, a common practice in ethnography and documentary filmmaking. At the same time, the artist uses film not as a means of classical realism, but as a genre of poetry. That is why she embraces the vocabulary of theater and expanded cinema, consciously blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction. Inviting improvisation and chance, she explores the potential for re-writing history.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz was born in 1972 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, studied in Chicago and now lives and works in San Juan. Her work is represented by the artists’ cooperative Sociedad del Tiempo Libre based in San Juan, which she co-founded, and which organizes collective projects outside of existing art structures. 

Programmed by the board of the Secession. 
Curated by Bettina Spörr.

Publications
The exhibitions are accompanied by publications. The digital publications are available for free here.

Opening program
Exhibition talk: Thursday, December 5, 2024, 6pm
Rochelle Feinstein in conversation with Stephanie Weber and Justin Lieberman (in English), an event organized by the Secession Friends

Opening: Thursday, December 5, 2024, 7pm

Press contact: presse@secession.at 
Press preview: Thursday, December 5, 2024, 10 a.m.
Press materials: secession.at/presse.