Art Monthly 485
April 2025

Contents

Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader, What’s Left, 2025

Interview

Good Vibrations

Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader interviewed by Hannah Wallis

Anger comes out of one isolated experience, but rage is this sensitive point that if it gets pushed, you have a disproportionate response because you are not responding to one small thing. It’s an accumulation of all the anger you have ever held.

Pilar Monsell, The Periphery of the Imagination, 2023

Feature

Peripheral Vision

Bob Dickinson considers the role of artists in the hinterland between rural and urban worlds

The centre–periphery dichotomy still echoes today, and it especially haunts contemporary cultural politics in its continuing relevance to former colonial countries in the global south.

Robert Zhao Renhui, For A Guide to the Secondary Forest of Singapore, 2024

Feature

Afterburn

As we enter the Pyrocene Age, Maja and Reuben Fowkes ask what political lessons can trees teach us and how do artists act as emissaries of arboreal ministry

Artists are among the few voices ready to point out the gaping holes in the depoliticising projects of green transition, net zero and carbon trading, and to revitalise radical eco-visions of ‘other futures’.

Ebun Sodipo , ‘I Found Venus and She Was Transexual’, 2022

Profile

Ebun Sodipo

Tendai Mutambu

The meme takes centre stage in Sodipo’s work, a form that careens through timelines and phone chats, accruing and losing meaning, multiplying at high velocity before its eventual obsolescence.

Editorial

Now is the Time

The idea that artists should keep their politics out of their art sprang from the fact that traditionally artists worked for the church or state, but an insistence on such a distinction today is long outdated. Instead, the question has become: if not now, when?

Walter Benjamin’s call for resistance, like Benjamin himself, was overwhelmed by events that no one could have foreseen. We have no such excuse.

Artnotes

Review Calling

The government review of ACE has published its terms of reference and is seeking comment on ACE’s activities; major public galleries in London and New York cut staff; the policy of universal free admission to museums is in the spotlight again; the arts sector is one of the worst offenders for paying below the Living Wage; Welsh arts and culture receives a much-needed funding boost; plus the latest on galleries, people, awards and more.

Obituaries

Mel Bochner 1940–2025
Liam Gillick

Mark Pawson 1964–2025
Bridget Penney and Paul Holman

Andrew Testa, Allercombe tree village, on the route of the proposed A30 Honiton Bypass, Devon, December, 1996, ‘Resistance’, Turner Contemporary, Margate

Exhibitions

Resistance: How Protest Shaped Britain and Photography Shaped Protest

Turner Contemporary, Margate

Martin Herbert

Leigh Bowery!

Tate Modern, London

Daniel Culpan

Tarot – Origins & Afterlives

The Warburg Institute, London

Peter Suchin

Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991

Kunsthalle Wien

Juliet Jacques

Mohammed Z Rahman: Remember to Live

Peer, London

Amrita Dhallu

American Artist: Shaper of God

Pioneer Works, New York

Ravi Ghosh

Bahar Noorizadeh

FACT, Liverpool

Sarah E James

TJ Clark, Those Passions

Books

TJ Clark: Those Passions – On Art and Politics

Adam Heardman

For TJ Clark, creativity with a social conscience (or even consciousness) must exist in a hybrid state between the visionary and the achievable, the imagined and the material. A root-and-branch approach, but with a view of the sky.

Steven Eastwood and the Neurocultures Collective, The Stimming Pool, 2024

Film

Steven Eastwood and the Neurocultures Collective: The Stimming Pool

Maria Walsh

After a day’s work in a busy office where their masking of autistic traits takes its toll, they arrive home and cavort on the floor and across the kitchen furniture with a mix of exhaustion and release, comedy and intensity, watched over by a border collie.

Shu Lea Cheang and Dondon Hounwn, Hagay Dreaming, 2025,

Performance

Shu Lea Cheang and Dondon Hounwn: Hagay Dreaming

Cherry Smyth

In one of the most poignant moments, the hunter plays on the beams as if weaving on a bow loom and chants to the other dancers who answer her urgent call.

Tarek Atoui, At-Tāriq, 2025

Sound

Tarek Atoui: At-Tāriq – A Journey into the Rural Museum Traditions of North Africa and the Arab World

Chris Hayes

Speakers are embedded within domestic objects, their echoes diffused through fabric and wood. Sounds emerge from unexpected places, filling the space with layered, shifting tones.

PoMo’s reading room, Trondheim

Reports

Letter from Trondheim

Henry Broome

Images of Edvard Munch’s The Scream have the same name recognition as Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers or Claude Monet’s Water Lilies – it is also one of the few artworks to be turned into an emoji.

San Telmo museum, San Sebastian

Reports

Letter from the Basque Country

Duncan Wheeler

The Guggenheim franchise is now seen as the cause of gentrification and rising property prices. Nor does it help matters that the museum has been unable to fulfil its initial impression to local stakeholders and politicians of reclaiming Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, 1937, for the Basque Country.

Pallavi Paul, How Love Moves, 2023

Reports

Letter from Sharjah

Chris McCormack

It is the serious scope of the Biennial that forces a response to not only meet its invitation to explore the depth of the work on show, but to also consider the limitations still present across the UAE.

William Kentridge, Second-hand Reading, 2013, estimate £15,000–20,000, sold for £158,750

Salerooms

Fluctuating Values

Colin Gleadell

One must look back to the financial crash of 2009 for a lower total for London’s winter sales. But this was not a crash: the total was pretty much as estimated.

Richard Prince, (Untitled, Dylan), 2014

Artlaw

A Complete Unknown

Henry Lydiate

Some artists consciously appropriate an entire work of another artist into their own creation. Such borrowings are designed to be self-evident (even though there may be changes of scale or medium or colour, as with Richard Prince’s three Bob Dylan canvases) and are intended to engage the spectator in intellectual consideration of the original work in its new context.