Keren Cytter hypnotized me twice in the past few weeks. And I liked it. The first time was in London, where her audio piece Constant State of Grace (2014) was installed in a busy corridor at Frieze Art Fair. Headset on, I was asked by a robotic voiceover to let go, to embrace the fact that someone or something else was “taking over,” and to “overcome [my] feelings”—of being lost in the supermarket, in my case. Combined with an acoustic loop of binaural beats, which stimulate brain waves to induce relaxation and meditation, the voice instructed me, instead, to enjoy the “smiling faces” and “foreign landscapes” of the fair: a soothing, creepy, and hilarious antidote to the cupio dissolvi [wish to be dissolved] in the surrounding sea of consumption. It happened again at the artist’s second solo show at Galleria Raffaella Cortese in Milan, when I sat alone in front of Cytter’s latest video, Ocean (2014). Watching alone was not a personal choice: the work, displayed on a monitor, includes only one set of headphones and one office chair, so intimacy is coerced from its viewers. This prescriptive one-to-one condition recalls the setting of a therapy session, or one of our …

A spotlight can transform quite a bit with an economy of means, making something instantly visible, no matter how small or familiar. Post-winter sunlight can achieve a similar effect, which is why “The Spring Awakening” was an apt title choice for the program of exhibitions, openings, and performances organized around this year’s miart fair. Although everything under its purview was already on the urban map, miart’s new ventures made the local network of artists, institutions, and galleries look fresher and more energetic, signaling a positive shift within the cultural sphere. Milan’s contemporary art scene seems to be finally catching up with the success of the city’s annual furnishing design bash Salone Internazionale del Mobile, perhaps by emulating its three-part format: a serious fair to busy one’s self for half the day; a range of things to see about town for the other half; and a wide array of social gatherings. On Friday night at 1 a.m., when I stopped by at the Ulrico Hoepli Planetarium to see Stan VanDerBeek’s Cine Dreams: Future Cinema of The Mind (1972/2014)—an immersive installation of over 50 16mm films and slide projections presented for the first time in its entirety since its premiere—the queue outside …

There are portraits of two women in this exhibition by Miroslaw Balka and Roni Horn. Who knew that a portrait of a lady could reveal so much, that a portrait of a lady could become a portrait of the artist? It’s tempting to read these images as condensed biographies reflecting on individual art histories. Set up in the same room, they collide in an uncomfortable tête-à-tête. How appropriate, for a show titled “Gespräche über persönliche Themen” (Conversations about private themes), jointly conceived by the artists and installed like a neat conversation piece. The pairing marks the last episode of an annual program based on “duets” (Daria Martin and Anna Halprin; Michael Fliri and Asta Gröting), introduced by Raffaella Cortese to celebrate the opening of a twin space of her gallery on the same street. First we meet Márgret Haraldsdóttir, who emerges from the hot pools of Iceland and whose face is as subtly changing as the clouds in an overcast sky in Untitled (Weather) (2011). Horn—who identifies with the nature of Iceland, a country she has been visiting regularly since her early twenties and made the chore of her personal “encyclopedia,” To Place (1990–ongoing)—asked Márgret to pose again for this series, …