“Do you love me, even though I’m sometimes irritating and a little bit selfish?” Miranda July asks in the brief audio recording The Crowd (2004). I wasn’t sure. I had spent nearly three hours in July’s solo exhibition at Fondazione Prada’s Osservatorio—the first major retrospective of her performance and visual art—and I was getting tired. Her voice echoed off the walls of the bathroom where the piece had been installed. “That’s a good thing, because I love you too. I’m just not very good at it! But I’m trying to change,” she responds. A recorded audience cheers. “This song is for you and it’s a love song,” July concludes, her voice fading to the sounds of a band tuning up. As I washed and dried my hands, I warmed back up at the cheerful resolution. As though anticipating my grumpiness, the artist had assured me of her affection. The Crowd is a succinct example of July’s signature performance move: vulnerability, bordering on neurosis, giving way to sentimental declarations that secure her power. She has a gift for connecting with an audience, cutting through the noise of a large group to create intimacy with individuals. Organized by Mia Locks, “New Society” …

Beatrice Gibson’s first solo exhibition in Italy takes its title from Alice Notley’s column in the self-published 1990s New York zine Scarlet. In the column, Notley invited readers to transcribe their dreams, printing them alongside articles, poetry, and editorials about the AIDS crisis and the Gulf War, sharing with the Surrealists a feeling that dreams were both aesthetically striking and politically potent. Gibson’s response to Notley’s work includes three films. Ordet’s main space is dominated by the newest, Dreaming Alcestis (2022), in which Euripides’ heroine inspires a portrayal of the process of dreaming, and how external stimuli, experienced by day or night, shape the unconscious imagination. In Dear Barbara, Bette, Nina—a four-minute work made in Palermo in 2020 and presented on a small monitor, with headphones, to one side of the room—Gibson reads from a phone a letter to three older women filmmakers over a shot of her hands at rest. Deux Sœurs Qui Ne Sont Pas Sœurs [Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters] (2019), loosely adapted from a Gertrude Stein screenplay written in 1929, is shown on a large screen in its own room. It provides a collective portrait of Gibson’s influences, friends, and collaborators—including Notley herself—in a time …

The sleek, sardonic work of Scandinavian duo Elmgreen & Dragset has found a consummate context in the Fondazione Prada, a private museum founded by luxury fashion entrepreneurs. The question mark in the exhibition title—“Useless Bodies?”—signals an interrogation of the human body as a viable organ in contemporary society, played out within the context of a western-centric ideal of beauty and vitality. The main space, called the Podium and employed in all the term’s senses of stage, soapbox, and platform, is arrayed with human figures engaged in related but disassociated activities. Classical marble nudes—tautly muscled athletes, a young shepherd with a dog, and a reclining gladiator among them—mingle with bronze sculptures of pubescent boys to suggest a diorama in an archaeological museum. The only woman represented is Pregnant White Maid (2017), regarding a petulant, pouting schoolboy (Invisible, 2017) with her eyes decidedly shut. All of the contemporary bronze figures are lacquered in opaque white or buffed to a brilliant glow, with the exception of a striking black Runner, from the first century BC, idealized with Caucasian features and a startlingly realistic gaze. Like a terrarium, the main space is transparent yet hermetic, enhancing a sense of highly visible isolation, not …

Kasper Bosmans has turned the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro outside in. On entering his solo exhibition, the visitor is presented with a reproduction of a stylized city: painted onto the walls in shades of red are two ajar doors; assorted memorabilia can be glimpsed through a window display; a mural resembles a fake stone wall; and a thin pink highway painted on the floor, beside which rests an object resembling a discarded necklace, directs the viewer to a red wall on which hang three paintings the size of standard letter paper. Curator Eva Fabbris approached Bosmans about a show before the pandemic. The project morphed over the following months to suit the radically changing conditions, and to reflect art institutions’ ongoing anxiety over how they relate to their audiences. “A Perfect Shop-Front” could be thought of as a kind of trompe l’oeil: the minimal rendering of an urban project within an institution. A tiny strip of the city has percolated into an exhibition space, creating a zone of thresholds in which the boundaries between inside and outside are thin. A serendipitous detail: Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro is located just a few steps from Milan’s Navigli, two artificial water channels built in the …

Contrary to the press materials for Trisha Baga’s “the eye, the eye and the ear,” which liken the presentation to that of a natural history museum, the New York-based artist’s first institutional exhibition in Italy recalls the Egyptian Theater fad of golden-age Hollywood. A procession of “Hypothetical Artifacts” (2015–20), a series of ceramics sculptures precisely arranged on a plinth that zig-zags like a snake, offer the first hint of an architectural craze that followed the 1922 discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb. In this “geological corridor of evolution,” as the artist describes it, everyday objects such as picture frames, a printer, and a microscope are rendered like fossilized movie props. Several of these pieces appear in video installations positioned around the darkened gallery. Spot-lit and decorated with plants, lamps, furniture, and other items, the installations resemble sets on a soundstage. The “Hypothetical Artifacts” are displayed to one side of the dark, majestic spaces of Pirelli Hangar Bicocca—a cathedral-like black box both geographically and architecturally opposed to the light-flooded, neo-Renaissance Prada Foundation citadel on the other side of Milan. Nearby, another group from the same series—ceramic poodle heads resembling flame-topped Sphinxes—are placed on a pyramidal plinth. Both display surfaces bring to mind the …

As you walk up to Armada—through a courtyard ringed with industrial sheds and machine shops—placards appear to the right and left that read “adagio” (“drive slowly”), “non urtare” (“caution”), and again, “adagio.” Even if you aren’t the size of a truck, these signs have a way of making you proceed carefully, tentatively. As if moving through some large, lethargic organism. Armada is a former warehouse on the northern edge of Milan, converted into an artist-run space in 2013. The name brings to mind the fleet of Philip II, though there doesn’t seem to be any real connection. Except insofar as it’s managed by a crew of about 20 young people, with a range of artistic aspirations. What they all have in common is the experience of having studied at the Brera Academy under Alberto Garutti, a great figure in Italian public art whose presence can be felt here—the courtyard even contains a plaque with “Garutti” and a notice above it: “reserved, no parking.” His studio is close by. Gerasimos Floratos’s solo show at Armada, “Soft Bone Journey,” is comprised of three large paintings in oil and acrylic, and three sculptures, each the size of a person, made of painted styrofoam. (All …

THE BOAT The metaphor of the ship of state is best known from Plato’s Republic. In the “collective exhibition concept” developed by Udo Kittelmann for the Fondazione Prada, this maritime trope of political community is evoked unmistakably yet only obliquely, mediated through the titular citation of Leonard Cohen’s devastating 1988 song “Everybody Knows.” Ancient foundations meet our contemporary crisis in a palimpsestic detour perfectly befitting this brilliant, bewildering, and highly intertextual exhibition. Across three floors, Kittelmann interweaves the work of three German artists, each preeminent in their respective field, each with a distinct interest in the politics of illusion and the textures of modern experience: photographer Thomas Demand, filmmaker Alexander Kluge, and scenographer Anna Viebrock. The result is less an experience of disparate practices, let alone single artworks, than it is an encounter with a holistic, albeit fragmentary, reflection on truth, falsity, and the public sphere in an age of “alternative facts.” If the political community is a ship, this vessel is our quotidian domicile. Yet the ship is also a heterotopia—a space with its own time, its own rules. Inside Prada’s baroque palazzo—itself set apart from the tourist bustle—Viebrock has meticulously recreated an array of such “other spaces”: a …

The invitation to the third solo show by Mandla Reuter at Francesca Minini bears no title or explanation. It relies on just one image, evocative enough on its own: a moonless sea, rippled by waves. Even the press release, stripped of all syntax, is reduced to a chain of words that hint at some meaning but mostly conjure a mood. They include “water,” “island,” “forest,” “sewage,” “dusk,” “stamp,” ”chocolate,” and “remnants,” plus geographic locations, names of cities, and numerical measurements. So we visit the exhibition with this sea in our heads, so to speak, and a few inorganic clues. At the entrance, the exotic image of a bronze cocoa pod (Cacao, 2017), along with other specimens still nestled within their plaster molds, summons all the various things associated with this fruit (prosperity, exploitation, luxury, poverty, etc.). The viewer’s gaze is immediately drawn—with the sense of the sea growing stronger—to a huge salvage airbag (its crate also exhibited nearby) whose hyperbolic bulk fills and almost seals off the gallery. This sort of obstruction is not a new device for the artist, who in the past has blocked gallery entrances with boulders so that visitors had to strain for a glimpse of the …

One clean cut and—snip!—the plait of hair flops to the floor. Then comes the next braid—snip!—and the next—snip-snip! Strand by strand, all the remaining black hair of this Asian woman, dressed in traditional Kyrgyz garb, is sheared off by her own hand. It falls around her feet, leaving her neck bare. A black screen. The video starts over. We see the same woman again, now plucking the strings of an ancient instrument called the kyl kyyak, while a man braids the same long hair that will soon fall prey to her scissors. Around them, a swarm of people—random visitors to a museum in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan—gape at the scene. “This video/performance from 2001, titled Farewell Song, was inspired by an age-old custom in Kyrgyzstan, where women are supposed to let their hair grow until it is plaited into very thin braids for their wedding,” the gallery assistant tells me. “And so the scissors are symbolically severing all ties with a past that is felt to be stifling, in order to bid it farewell.” The artist seen here is Gulnara Kasmalieva, who along with with Muratbek Djumaliev (both live in Bishkek) seems to use the act of cutting (a leave-taking, a departure) as …

“Rats live on no evil star.” And “In a regal age ran I.” There is no apparent truth, no evident foundation, in these two double-sided expressions—same characters, reverse order—whose heads and tails can switch places like a juggler’s pins. Just a tumbling act of letters on the tightrope of some semblance of meaning, found in those special words or phrases that can be read from left to right or right to left without a hitch, through a simple mechanism properly termed a palindrome—from the Greek palindromos, “running back again,” like a crab, after it runs forward. Montreal-born, London-based Allison Katz is a true virtuoso of the genre, to the point that she’s titled her first exhibition with Giò Marconi in Milan “AKA”—a palindromic acronym that naturally stands for “also known as,” but which takes on a broader scope here with its almost obligatory hint at the initials “Allison-Katz-Allison.” Linguistic and phonetic associations do seem to whet the appetite of this Canadian artist, who also played with the sound of her first name in the title of her most recent solo show at Kunstverein Freiburg, “All Is On” (All-is-on), to which the show at Giò Marconi acts as a sort of postscript, …