Art Monthly 451: November 2021

Contents

Hiwa K, View from Above, 2017

Feature

Pinned Down

Hiwa K interviewed by Chris Clarke

For me, it is important in every work to be a betrayer, to not be loyal to my ideas. Otherwise you become a designer. And sometimes you have to surprise yourself. I cannot make a setting and stick to it, because I get stuck in it.

Jason Hirata, ‘From Now in Then’, installation view at Fanta-MLN with Painted Square, 2021, on the floor and Car, 2021, which took viewers wherever they need to go after visiting the exhibition

Feature

Remote Working

Saim Demircan finds that working remotely has given rise to new ways to think about accessibility, labour and authorship

Perhaps the absence of the artist commits a final act of anti-objectification, eschewing the prerequisite in the art world to be ‘everywhere’ at all times.

Barbican Stories: an indispensable record of discrimination in the workplace

Feature

Crisis Communications

Chris Hayes argues that, despite its faults, social media can still be used a tool against powerful vested interests

Part of what fascinates me about the art world’s use of Instagram is this tension: how fluidly a vernacular of call-outs and accountability, calls to defund and abolish, are adopted and performed on platforms that are easily dismissed and rarely carry any stakes.

Adam Farah, Spiritual Teething

Profile

Adam Farrah

Larne Abse Gogarty tugs at the cultural references of the London-born artist also known as free.yard

Farah offers a way of negotiating nostalgia, sentiment and universality while asking viewers to negotiate their own particularities of class, race and history.

Editorial

Eh?

Why do cultural agencies persist with stifling bureaucratic language that acts as a barrier to non-corporate voices?

When applying for a grant, for example, the first test of eligibility appears to be whether the applicant can understand and negotiate – digest – the sheer quantity of verbiage required in the process.

Artnotes

University Action

University lecturers go on strike at the Royal College of Art and Goldsmiths; Cuban artist Tania Bruguera agrees to political exile in return for the release of activists; Manchester’s Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art restructures in response to accusations of institutional racism; Unesco finally recommends that the Parthenon Sculptures be returned to Greece; plus the latest on galleries, people, prizes and more.

Peggy Ahwesh, Lessons of War, 2014, Spike Island

Exhibitions

Thea Djordjadze: all building as making

Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin

Mark Prince

Gregg Bordowitz: I Wanna Be Well

MoMA PS1, New York

Benoit Loiseau

Peggy Ahwesh: Vision Machines

Spike Island, Bristol

Adam Hines-Green

Margate Now: Sunken Ecologies

Royal Esplanade, Westbrook

Ellen Mara De Wachter

Tip of the Iceberg

Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea

Matthew Bowman

Illiberal Arts

HKW, Berlin

Luisa Lorenza Corna

Angelica Mesiti: In the Round

Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh

Tom Denman

Untitled: Art on the conditions of our time

Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge

Greg Thomas

Gustav Metzger at the Merz Barn

Merz Barn, Elterwater

David Briers

The Toe, The Horse, The Sister

Artists’ Books

Maria Zahle: The Toe, The Horse, The Sister

Adam Heardman

Maria Zahle’s new publication is a book and an art-object that’s at least as concerned with breath as it is with geometry. The paper has been cut and styled and patterned with shapes, gaps, marks, typographic flourishes, intrusions upon the text. These intrusions become part of the language.

Books

Boris Groys: Logic of the Collection

Daniel Neofetou

Boris Groys goes on to suggest that our inability to situate contemporary art anywhere else than ‘in an invisible space between the norm and the deviation from the norm’ means that we should all adopt the temporal position of the migrant.

Books

Bluecoat, Liverpool: The UK’s First Arts Centre

Bob Dickinson

Bluecoat’s success in reinventing itself complemented the arrival of Tate Liverpool in 1988, and gave rise to Merseyside Moviola and the creation of Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT), helping to secure the city’s European Capital of Culture status in 2008.

Urias, Racha, 2020

Film

Notes on Travecacceleration

Conal McStravick

In the titular video made in collaboration with Occulted and Joaquim Ramalho, Ode appears as a digital oracle, or orixá, who speaks from the hypermediated spectacle of the travesti and colonial archives.

Diego Marcon, The Parents’ Room, 2021

Reports

Letter from Naples

Mark Sladen

The ambition that Giuseppe Morra brought to Naples is still detectable at his foundation, which has a hare-brained grandeur: its exhibitions have been mapped out for 100 years.

Malgorzata Markiewicz, Medusa, 2021, Styrian Armoury

Reports

Letter from Graz

Agnieszka Gratza

In contrast to the stilted, familiar and rather cold vision of the continent that came across in ‘Europe: Ancient Futures’, here was a Mitteleuropa in the true sense of the word.

Salerooms

Frieze Week

Colin Gleadell

In the past couple of years, the London market has looked fragile in the wake of Brexit, the expansion of Paris, the exodus of Italian dealers and the explosion of Asia into western markets. This year, Sotheby’s gave up about £60m of art, mostly by contemporary western artists, to its Hong Kong branch for a sale the week before Frieze.

Beeple, Abundance, 2021, NFT physical token

Artlaw

Automatic for the Beeple

Henry Lydiate

One of the highest-losing underbidders for Beeple’s Abundance NFT was Amir Soleymani, who was then required by Nifty Gateway to pay $650,000 for a numbered ‘second edition’. Soleymani was unaware that his initial registration for the auction had included a commitment to such a ‘second edition’ purchase, which he did not want, and refused to pay.