For its 14th edition, the nomadic European biennial Manifesta has taken up temporary residence in various cultural institutions and derelict spaces in and around Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, where creative mediator Catherine Nichols invited artists and practitioners to explore modes of storytelling across cultures. As a contested nation state, Kosovo embodies many of the most pressing and complex issues facing society today. When is a country a country? How many people have to say it is for it to be? Who has the authority to declare a territory as a nation? Does the population need to be homogenous? Who is nationalism good for? How can we all live together and be free? Roaming the city in search of the exhibitions and “artistic interventions”—by 102 artists in 25 locations, from an Ottoman-era hammam to a former brick factory—I attempted to plot pieces of the puzzle into a coherent picture. Interacting with locals in Pristina was inevitable, both to find the far-flung (and often vaguely signposted) locations and to glean how the tumultuous, not-so-distant past led to the complex present. The main exhibition, titled “The Grand Scheme of Things,” is hosted on seven floors of the Grand Hotel Pristina, a decadent …

Arseny Zhilyaev traveled to Manifesta, the European Nomadic Biennial. Back in the day, it was one of the Old World’s most experimental art venues. “The Planetary Garden,” its twelfth edition, opened in June in Palermo. The attempt by Italy’s newly minted right-wing populist government to reject a boatload of 629 refugees from Africa this June triggered a story that became Manifesta 12’s epigraph. A few days before the biennial’s official press conference, Palermo’s mayor, Leoluca Orlando, stormily announced he was ready to take on the federal government in Rome. He argued Italian authorities were violating international conventions and humanitarian principles, thus leaving him with no choice but to let the ship carrying the refugees dock at the port of Palermo, a city that has long incarnated hospitality and cultural intercourse. Orlando spoke on nearly the same topic at the opening press conference. Needless to say, given the previous two biennials—Manifesta 10’s “window on Europe,” held amid St. Petersburg’s imperial splendor, and Manifesta 11’s discussions of how artists could make money, held in one of the world’s most expensive cities, Zurich—the rhetorical tone adopted by Manifesta 12 seems timelier and more in keeping with the biennial’s original brief to exhibit new, …

Guy Mees (1935–2003) was a leading figure of the Belgian avant-garde whose enigmatic work combined formal diversity with conceptual rigor. A consecutive pair of exhibitions at Barcelona’s ProjecteSD—the first from March to April, the second from May to June—shed light on his career, offering carefully curated series of works alongside archival materials that situate his practice in a wider art-historical background. Mees’s interest in serial structures, repetition, formal reduction, and industrial materials was in some ways typical of minimalism. But as these two exhibitions attest, his highly personal artistic language balanced formal rigor with fragile materials—stretched lace, pale neon, narrow strips of paper—to lend his work its characteristic delicacy. Each exhibition loosely corresponds to a distinct period in Mees’s career, during which he produced a series of works under the collective title “Verloren Ruimte” [Lost Space]. The first group, made between 1960 and 1967, feature simple, geometric wood and aluminum sculptures overlaid with industrial lace. The second, which Mees began in the mid-1980s and completed in the mid-1990s, is looser and more vivid, comprising strips of colored paper pinned to the wall. Despite their formal differences, both series investigate the relationship between art objects and their exhibitionary environments. Displaying these works …

In 2001, Maurizio Cattelan invited a group of the 49th Venice Biennale’s VIP guests to join a satellite event in Palermo: a cocktail reception in Bellolampo, the city’s main landfill, where the artist had installed a larger-than-life replica of the Hollywood Sign overlooking the Conca d’Oro, the defaced coastal “golden bowl” once filled with citrus groves. It was a vitriolic triumph of trash and a homage to the fictionalization of “a city that has to struggle every day with its own conceptions of its past and present,” the artist said. A few months later, Diego Cammarata, the candidate from Silvio Berlusconi’s party Forza Italia, won the local elections. His victory ended the long tenure of Leoluca Orlando, who during two nonconsecutive terms as mayor between 1985 and 2000 championed the anti-mafia movement known as the Palermo Spring. Seventeen years later, Orlando is back in the mayor’s seat for the fifth time, as leader of a center-left coalition; a new biennale has landed in town; and another work—art collective Rotor’s installation Da quassù è tutta un’altra cosa [From up here, everything looks different] (2018)—invites viewers to visit another devastated hill perched atop the city. Nicknamed “the hill of shame,” the Pizzo Sella …

A piercing whistle punctuates the blaring of a trumpet. But in the columned central space of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, the only visible instrument is a grand piano. For three days a week throughout the course of the exhibition, the instrument is played—and, one could say, worn—by a pianist who stands in a hole cut into its center. Leaning over the rim of the piano to strike the keys, the performer energetically interprets the fourth movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 (1824), while slowly pushing the wheeled instrument around the space. The building has become a musical box, the exhibition orchestrated so that one movement flows into the other, spilling through the gallery’s spaces to create a dissonant soundscape. The piano of Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for a Prepared Piano (2008) could be thought of as the lead performer of Puerto Rico-based duo Allora & Calzadilla’s show. Popularly known as “Ode to Joy,” Beethoven’s piece has often been interpreted as a defense or celebration of humanist values, and in 1985 the European Union adopted it as its official anthem. Yet, as Slavoj Žižek has noted, the tune’s “universal adaptability” has made it vulnerable to use …

“If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word ‘citizenship’ means.” I was sent into a cold rage when I read these words what feels like a never-ending day ago in the transcript from Theresa May’s Conservative Party Conference speech of October 2016. The sentences still reverberate. Supposedly they targeted “people in positions of power [who] behave as though they have more in common with international elites than with the people down the road, the people they employ, the people they pass in the street.” They simultaneously scorned free movement, no-borders politics, and international solidarity. For those opposed to the Leave campaign’s catalyzing effects on xenophobia, disinvestment, and abstract nationalist desire to “take back control,” a heavy blow to hope had already been struck by the vote back in June. Following her appointment as prime minister, May’s formal response to the referendum result set the electorate’s action into cruel and condescending relief. “Orange World” opened in Barcelona two months after the Catalan referendum for independence from Spain. During my stay there, the city is punctuated by pro-independence yellow ribbons tied to railings or graffitied onto walls. Apartment buildings are …

Earlier this summer, after a public talk between Elena Sorokina and my wife, Chus Martínez, the three of us were invited by Eduard Mayoral of Galeria Mayoral to dinner. We hadn’t yet reached dessert when Eduard asked us what to make of Salvador Dalí. They were about to open a group exhibition, “The Space of Dreams,” curated by poet Vicenç Altaió, that would include Dalí’s work. Last year the gallery had also exhibited a series of six of Dalí’s fashion sketches from 1965, with elegantly absurd designs for beachwear and evening robes. These drawings were still for sale for 100,000 euro each. Apart from his major paintings, the market for Dalí remains murky. Not only did he flood the market by signing all and everything, his historical importance is also in question. When I interviewed Boris Groys in 2010, he used Dalí as a perfect example of an artist who didn’t manage to appeal to both “the mass public and the informed part of the audience.” “Dalí overdid it, lapsed too far into poor taste and did not stand in any central tradition.” The typical counter-example of someone catering to the art elite and the masses equally (who Groys also mentioned) is …

While it has been widely exhibited in her native Portugal, Ana Jotta’s work hasn’t been presented in depth to the Barcelona public since the early 1990s. So this mini-survey of her production from 1980 to the present, framed as part of the Barcelona Gallery Weekend, is overdue. “Abans que me n’oblidi (Before I forget)” begins (or ends) at the intermediary patio space that one crosses before entering the main exhibition space at ProjecteSD. Part of a curved wall is covered with irregular patches of light gray and pale pink paint, as if emulating swatch tests for a redecoration. This playful gesture sets the tone for the exhibition inside, a somber and subtle palette of delicate intonations and provisional arrangements. A dozen pieces are sparingly hung around the perimeter of the exhibition space. A large aquatint depicts a delicate wire fence (Untitled, 2002) and a portable projection screen is covered with a torrent of black-and-white strokes (Un Printemps 2008, 2008). This is the only work in the exhibition that appears to confirm Jotta’s own reductive description of herself as a painter, despite having tackled all manner of craft, from embroidery to writing. The sleek finish of the blue steel wall piece Cloud …

Barcelona’s Loop art fair, which started in 2003, is the oldest and most established initiative to assert the commercial potential of film and video. The medium’s ephemeral nature, and its associations with the very different market values of cinema, have contributed to a continued reluctance from collectors, attracted by the aura of more traditional art forms. Paradoxically, these tricky market credentials have recently endowed the moving image with a critical cachet in institutional art spaces and museums. As the institutional assimilation of practices traditionally seen as marginal, and oppositional, to the art market continues—from experimental film to the documentary—the instrumental role of film and video takes on a significant historical resonance in art discourse. In order to assign value to this wayward and ambiguous media within the context of an art fair, Loop has to negotiate a conflicted territory. How to maintain its more market-driven function without appearing to dismiss these historic discourses of disavowal, which will themselves provide validation for the sale of moving image works? I received the answer at my hotel desk, where I received the exhibition catalogue for “Empathy,” Harun Farocki’s show at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies. The enclosed compliment slip asserts Farocki’s role as a “close …

Contemporary artists are great at being dilettantes. Some make a point of how liberating it is to lack skill, others of how liberating it is to delegate to those who know better. Meanwhile, machines continue to outdo humans in more and more skills. More and more humans work in some sort of managerial position, in which their job profile resembles that of a contemporary artist: a bit of research, a bit of creativity, a bit of giving orders, a bit of receiving orders, and lots of micro-communication. More and more jobs are short-term and poorly paid—like most commissions for artists. Those professionals who don’t work like artists act like artists in their spare time, whether by creating artifacts or by remodeling their personas. Today, being an artist is the norm; specialists are the exotic birds that artists once were. To work with a specialist has become an exquisite experience that can easily be turned into a piece of art. This must have been the starting point for German artist Christian Jankowski when curating the 11th edition of the “European biennial” Manifesta, hosted this time by Zurich. Jankowski—who made himself known for works created with the help of fortune tellers, speechwriters, or …