Art Monthly : Recent Articles

Middlesbrough Art Week

Tom Jeffreys reports on an exemplary critical art festival that supports communities of artists at the grassroots level

Why Surrealism Matters • The medium of Leonora Carrington

Anna Dezeuze argues that Surrealism’s unfettered individual creativity is increasingly vital in an age when alternative worlds are disappearing and imagination is outsourced to machines

Speculative Libraries

Nick Thurston on libraries as artworks

Soumya Sankar Bose: Braiding Dusk and Dawn

Vaishna Surjid is shaken by the artist’s inquiry into his mother’s mysterious three-year disappearance, aged nine, during political crises in West Bengal

Pissed Off

Henry Broome on homelessness, sanitation and public art

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley: THE REBIRTHING ROOM

Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou on a video-game installation that provides a traumatic but transformative experience

Self-Determination: A Global Perspective

Adam Hines-Green discovers connections in a timely exhibition of art from newly independent nations.

Radical Jewishness

Caspar Heinemann argues that curators have downplayed politics in Nicole Eisenman’s Whitechapel Gallery show

Ali Cherri

Maria Walsh on the Lebanese artist‘s use of dreamlike visions to negotiate conflict

Open City Documentary Festival 2023: The Art of Non-Fiction

Alex Fletcher reports on the contested role of subjectivity in recent documentary filmmaking

Naomi Pearce: Innominate

Jonathan P Watts on the forensic feminist methodology at the heart of an artist studio mystery novel

Artists in a Time of War

Max L Feldman finds that this historical survey exhibition is nevertheless most focused on current events in Ukraine and Afghanistan

Outer Spaces

Greg Thomas reports on the rise of short-let artist-run spaces in Edinburgh city centre

Frida Orupabo

Phoebe Cripps on the Norwegian artist’s use of historical archives to return an unsettling colonial gaze

A Tall Order! Rochdale Art Gallery in the 1980s

Eddie Chambers argues that the contributions of regional public galleries in the 1980s raises questions about their impact today

Class Issues: Art Production In and Out of Precarity

Martin Herbert encounters an all-too-rare exhibition exploring the issue of classism

Roy Claire Potter: Land Lay Moldbrest • David Steans: Mummy Hood Nesting Forest

Jamie Sutcliffe is consumed by two new net art commissions that explore landscape horror through hypertext

The Double: Identity and Difference in Art Since 1900

Richard A Kaye encounters the magic of the double in this inspired exhibition

Array Collective: The Druthaib’s Ball

Joanne Laws decodes the Irish symbolism in Array’s anti-imperialist artwork

Letter from the Hamptons

Daniel Neofetou on an East Coast culture clash

Jitish Kallat: Covering Letter • Tangled Hierarchy

Adam Heardman on Jitish Kallat’s installation and curated exhibition confronting colonialism

59th Venice Biennale: The Milk of Dreams

Chris Clarke finds a parallel timeline revealed

Radio Ballads

Maria Walsh encounters socially engaged artworks in an east London council office and a west London royal park.

Every Ocean Hughes: One Big Bag

Lucia Farinati discovers the importance of death doulas

Andrea Fraser: This meeting is being recorded

Olivia Aherne feels the discomfort in Andrea Fraser’s confrontational anti-racism video installation

Learning to Unlearn

Greg Thomas reports on the Ignorant Art School series of exhibitions

Crip Time

Martin Herbert is challenged by MMK Frankfurt’s ambitious exhibition of disability-related art

Letter from Naples

Mark Sladen encounters a chilling new film in a city where edgy art has long been welcome

Trouble In Outer Heaven: Portable Ops Plus

Martin Herbert stalks through a chilling alternative sci-fi realm that is nevertheless eerily familiar

Tino Sehgal at Blenheim Palace

Adam Heardman witnesses an encounter between relational aesthetics and rarefied pomp

Leah Capaldi: Big Slit

Cherry Smyth finds herself alive in the livefeed

Mental Health and Art

Tim Steer on art projects that reveal the sociopolitical roots of mental-health issues

High Streets for All?

Matthew Noel-Tod on the instrumentalisation of artists by property developers in a time of crisis

Rosa-Johan Uddoh

Chloe Carroll shows that the artist’s background in architecture enables her to interrogate the identarian influence of cultural spaces

Art and Activism in the Age of Systemic Crisis: Aesthetic Resilience

Francis Frascina discovers the limits of this collection of essays focused on art that nurtures change

Dan Hicks: The Brutish Museums

George Vasey on the argument that museums must care for people more than objects

Lottery Lives

Current art-funding schemes, despite their meritocratic veneer, remain incurably unjust. It is time, says Michaële Cutaya, for a radical shake-up.

Park McArthur: Kunsthalle_guests Gaeste.Netz.5456

Mitchell Anderson on embodiment in the US artist’s audio tour of the gallery space

Anti-Anti-Semitism or the ‘Alt-Right’?

Following the controversial special issue of leftist art magazine Texte zur Kunst, Sarah E James asks what happens when anti-anti-Semitism meets the ‘alt-right’

Matt Wolf: Spaceship Earth

Lin Er-Ying on the lessons to be learned from this cautionary tale of Biosphere 2, the spectacular but doomed 1980s ecological experiment

Online Round-up

Lauren Velvick on the variety of approaches, from browser plug-ins to web interruptions, that artists and organisations are using to present art online

Shanzhai Lyric

Alexandra Symons Sutcliffe on the way the New York duo’s work charts the flows of capital that shape our world

Michael Hanna

Maeve Connolly examines the artist‘s interest in time travel, everyday language, patterns and technological utopianism

How to Make Art in a Pandemic?

Khairani Barokka considers ableism in art in the light of the Covid-19 lockdown

Steve McQueen

Adam Hines-Green finds that the Oscar-winning artist is liberated by the limitations of video

Reflections on Education from the Frontlines

Royal College of Art lecturers challenge the business-first approach of British universities and their art departments

Sophie Cundale

Kathryn Lloyd examines the London-based artist’s new work, which takes on Greek mythology, cinema and the world of boxing to address long-term concerns about loss and trauma.

Alex Margo Arden and Caspar Heinemann: The farmyard …

Larne Abse Gogarty finds this exhibition and two-act play to be an antidote to today’s cruel and crass political landscape.

The Found Archive of Hani Jawherieh

Amna Malik explores Void Project’s thoughtful feminisation of contested representations of masculinity through the work of the late Palestinian filmmaker.

Imran Perretta

George Vasey discusses the coercive role of images and hidden racial, social and economic biases of photographic and other technologies, as revealed in the work of the London-based artist.

Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Adrian Jackson: Here For Life

Hettie Judah reviews a collaborative film that follows the lives of Londoners as their city changes around them

Carolyn Lazard

Giulia Smith discusses the Philadelphia-based artist’s political agenda, which centres on changing the institutional treatment of disability rather than merely representing it

Richard Grayson: Possessions_inc.

Jamie Sutcliffe navigates the vortex of superstition and techno-consipiracy in Richard Grayson’s online video series

Letter from Zurich

Aoife Rosenmeyer is peeved by the art market’s framing of older female artists as Cinderellas waiting gratefully to be discovered

Call & Response

Morgan Quaintance takes issue with the political claims made in Stephanie Bailey’s article ‘Athens: Future Past’ and Stephanie Bailey responds

Harry Meadley: But what if we tried?

Tom Emery finds out what happens when a public gallery attempts to exhibit every artwork in its collection at once

Letter from Houston

Astrid Korporaal finds a pioneering spirit full of hope for positive change in a city with a surprisingly rich art heritage

Meiro Koizumi: Battlelands

Amy Luo reviews the Japanese artist’s collaboration with US military veterans

Bow Gamelan Ensemble: Great Noises that Fill the Air

Morgan Quaintance enjoys the artist sound collective as an enthralling reminder of the experimental alternative to cultural conservatism

Letter from Kampala

George Vasey reports on the Ugandan capital’s energetic but under-resourced art scene

Letter from Korea: One Step at a Time

Chris McCormack reports on the Gwangju and Busan biennales at a tentatively hopeful time in Korean politics

Private Museums

Aoife Rosenmeyer on the current boom in private art institutions

Oberhausen: Leaving the Cinema

Adam Pugh uses the 64th Oberhausen International Short Film Festival to show that cinema is essential today, it being one of the few remaining social structures to enable public assembly

Martha Rosler and Hito Steyerl: War Games

Stephanie Schwartz reviews the two-artist show at Switzerland’s Kunstmuseum Basel

Art Investigation

Daniel Neofetou argues that Forensic Architecture’s success in the art world is symptomatic of a broader demotion of art’s capacity for political opposition

Forensic Architecture: Counter Investigations

Maria Walsh reviews the group’s ICA exhibition

School: A Recent History of Self-Organised Art Education

Lauren Houlton reviews Sam Thorne’s survey of independent art schools

Andreas Gursky

Martin Herbert reviews the German photographer’s Hayward Gallery retrospective

Letter from Cairo: The Way Back

Maxa Zoller on Egypt’s post-revolution art scene

Terre Thaemlitz

The Minnesota-born, Kawasaki-based artist, writer, DJ and composer explores gender and systolic systems, and argues against reconciliation

What is Happening?

Laure Genillard asks why won’t more galleries voice the fact that art fairs are rapidly eroding their viability

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