I vowed to quit smoking (again) in March. Then March happened and discipline of any kind seemed naïve in the face of global chaos that has undermined the assumption that we can control our own fate. Now it is October and we are in the middle of a second (third, twelfth) wave and Runo Lagomarsino’s solo exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake, “I am also smoke,” does nothing to renew my resolve. It is an ode to the liminality of moments spent with one’s addiction in the face of existential instability. On one level I read “I am also smoke” as an ode to smoking because it is bookended in the space by works that directly involve cigarettes. The first sculpture one encounters upon entering—Air d’exil (we smoke for the dead, we store the dead, but they are not dead) (2019)—is a neat double row of Duchampian glass globes filled with smoke exhaled by Syrian asylum seekers. The last work in the show, Yo Tambien soy humo / I am also smoke (2020), is a video of the artist’s father relating the experience of his first cigarette on European soil after fleeing Argentina with his young family following the 1976 …

The year is 1977. Iggy Pop just released “The Passenger,” Eric Clapton mourns his son’s death in the 1990s-hit “Tears in Heaven,” and Ronald Reagan’s nuclear weapons build-up has the world holding its breath. Time is warped in Gerard Byrne’s seamless amalgamation of historical events, rock hits, and news reports from different years and political eras. With a hint of nostalgia and a subtle dose of humor, his film installation In Our Time (2017) takes us on a vortexed journey through the past, dodging monolithic history for ambiguity, conjuring an image distorted by our fallible memory and extending to inhabit the present. Byrne is a master of reconstructions, of revisiting and restaging situations from recent history. In the three-channel video New Sexual Lifestyles (2003), he convened actors to appear on a panel that was originally published by Playboy in 1973 to debate “emerging behavior patterns, from open marriage to group sex.” The cameras circle around the cast, who impersonate figures such as the sex educator Betty Dodson, Deep Throat (1972) star Linda Lovelace, gay church founder Troy Perry, and Al Goldstein, editor of the pornographic weekly tabloid Screw. They speculate about a future that now lies in the past, though some …

At one point in his 1960 book, Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti surveys “the symbology of nation states.” The English, he writes, see themselves as captains surrounded by sea; the Swiss are a single body linked beneath mountain peaks. Germans, in turn, assume symbolic form as an army, which Canetti calls a “marching forest.” “To this day,” he writes, the German “loves to go deep into the forest where his forefathers lived; he feels at one with the trees.” In such passages, Canetti not only maps landscape onto culture; he also implies how landscape can be molded to fit nationalist ends. Swedish artist Ann Böttcher has spent years working through this implication. Her 2008 show at Galerie Nordenhake, in Berlin, directly referenced Walther Schoenichen, a German biologist and environmentalist who also served the Nazi Party as Director of the Reich Forest Ministry. Alongside photogravures of pages from Schoenichen’s 1934 book, Urwaldwildnis in deutschen Landen [German Primeval Wilderness] were delicate graphite renderings of pine trees that Böttcher likened to German soldiers (The Dürer Drawings (after Pine tree 1495-97), 2006–2008). In “Transmigrations (Bookshelves, a cannon emplacement and a Mercedes),” Böttcher’s first solo show at Nordenhake’s Stockholm space, the artist continues this inquiry, now …