A sequence of photos by Chris Marker on display at New York’s Peter Blum Gallery features a little girl. The 51 images are mostly snapshots; matte, legal-pad-sized prints hung evenly at eye level around the four walls of the gallery. Some appear to have a kind of incidental chronology, following a single figure through different settings, as with the child in a dress. In one image, we are positioned behind her as she faces a propaganda poster. In another, we see her alone amidst a vast public plaza. In a third, she regards us quizzically alongside a strange painting on a stone wall. In each case we feel as if we are alongside the girl, sharing her field of vision and experience, rather than regarding her as a subject for pity or contemplation. The photos were taken in 1957 when “the formidable propaganda machine that would soon be identified with the sheer mention of North Korea wasn’t yet running at full throttle,” as Marker puts it in an accompanying testimony. The resulting photos, he notes with amusement, were rejected on both sides of the 38th parallel: “To the North, [work] which never mentioned once the name of Kim Il-sung simply didn’t …

Superflex, the Danish trio who famously installed a life-sized replica of JP Morgan Chase’s bathroom in a dumpy Lower East Side diner, has opened a comparatively sober exhibition at Peter Blum, stringing banners emblazoned with the logos of bankrupt banks throughout the gallery’s Chelsea location. Appropriately titled “Bankrupt Banks,” the exhibition continues the Danish group’s critiques of and investigations into financial markets and economic systems. Unwittingly and complacently fitting into the financial system that is the art world while critiquing those outside it, “Bankrupt Banks” packs a less fierce punch than the more socially conscious projects of the trio’s recent past. For “Bankrupt Banks,” Superflex (Bjørnstjerne Christiansen, Jakob Fenger, and Rasmus Nielsen) hones in on the graphic design efforts of banks that either declared bankruptcy or were acquired by other banks. Work titles detail which retired bank owns the logo, which non-defunct bank they’ve been acquired by, and on what date, should one forget, Bankrupt Banks / Merrill Lynch acquired by Bank of America, September 14, 2008 (2012); Bankrupt Banks / BankWest acquired by Commonwealth Bank of Australia, October 9th, 2008 (2012), et cetera. Kaupthing, Colonial Bank, Washington Mutual, and Anglo Irish also make appearances. Originally created to communicate power, prestige, …