“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, …

“Free Internet,” Trisha Baga’s exhibition at Giò Marconi, is a scrappy, energetic, stoned out tour de force in visual stimulation. Behind 3D glasses, your eyes have to move fast in order to focus on her continuous ping-pong of vacillating images: floating slices of salami, overlapping images, bats in caves, cats at night, partying animals, icons jumping at you, and internet search results with keywords like, “where is my vagina?”—which immediately reminded me of artist Nam June Paik’s 1962 hand-scrawled composition Danger Music for Dick Higgins: “Creep into the VAGINA of a living WHALE.”(1) Sounds, glitches, radio feeds, samples of laughter, and songs contribute to the work’s overall synesthesia. It’s like browsing through a chronology of fragments of “reality,” or whatever that means in the age of the Oculus Rift. And indeed, once inside the show, “Is this real?” becomes a persistent question. This must be—to borrow the term from art historian Michael Baxandall—our “period eye.” Baxandall first introduced this term in 1972 to characterize the impact of cultural factors on our ways of processing visual data and understanding pictures.(2) He argued, for instance, that during the Renaissance both painters and public embraced geometric perspective at a time when merchants and bankers …

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 …